Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh architecture discussion: format engine character set

[Jon Steinhart]

Ken Hornstein writes:
> Well, this works great if your locale is UTF-8.  But ... what happens
> if your email address contains UTF-8, and your locale setting is
> ISO-8859-1?
> 
> --Ken

You get "rubout" characters or whatever.  Nothing else can be done.

I think that you're asking "how do I display red when I don't have
red" and the answer is, you don't.  To be really retro about it, if
I'm reading email on a VT-100 and someone includes a UTF-8 arabic
character in the email address, I'm out of luck; it can't be displayed.

Are we making a bigger issue out of this than necessary?  There are
very few actual VT-100s left in the work outside of the Computer History
Museum.  Most people use devices that can support Unicode.  This is like
our old discussion about supporting non-Posix systems.  Who gets left in
the dust if we go Unicode?  Is it a significant portion of the user base?

Jon