At 2003-08-05 20:24, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
1. We don't really need to work out a single recoder interface that's best for every purpose.
Well, something has to be in the library. Certainly I'd like to see pure (non-IO) encodings: if these are fast enough, and we have all the available ones, it might be appropriate to define all others in terms of that. Otherwise I suppose there could be a base interface for pure encodings and a base interface for IO-based encodings. This of course would be less desirable from a purist viewpoint.
2. There are regional encodings in use which are not stateless (JIS is the only one I know of personally), so I think that a currentLocaleEncoding function will have to return a stateful interface.
OK
We have little choice but to use the C library's tables, and the only interface to them is the C conversion functions. ... 4. Existing C conversion libraries (whose interfaces we can't change) store their state in opaque data structures and provide no way to copy that state.
Which conversion library were you thinking of? This is true for iconv, which has a very simple interface, but apparently not for libc: see http://www.gnu.org/manual/glibc-2.2.5/html_node/Keeping-the-state.html -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA