On 2009 Jan 15, at 12:04, Gwern Branwen wrote:
Perhaps we're over-thinking all this. Is it a problem in any way to run encodeString over a String that is just normal ASCII (that is, no funky Unicode)?
AFAIK the only reason this is an issue at all is the desire to keep the dependencies of the core minimal; there is no technical reason otherwise for leaving the core's spawn as is. So the real question is whether we want to make the core depend on utf8-string or come up with some ugly hack that lets core use the ASCII-only version while contrib modules can use the UTF8 one. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH