Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Marcus Sundman]

On Friday 27 August 2004 21:25, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 08:13:49PM +0300, Marcus Sundman wrote:
> > An editor cannot possibly know which encoding a file has.
>
> Looks like you began with an empirically false statement. Mine does.

You are kidding, right? If you grok lisp then surely you can't be /that/ 
stupid.
Well, I can explain it anyway. Let's take some simple example. Let's say you 
have a file beginning with the bytes 0xFE and 0xFF. There is no way that 
your editor could know if this file is a big-endian UTF-16 file or an 
ISO-8859-1 file starting with "thorn yuml" or something completely 
different in some other encoding. Or let's consider the ISO-8859 encodings, 
which share the control characters. There is no way to know which one a 
file uses.

> (I leave it to the peanut gallery to give a range of examples of ways
> in which this can work)

I don't know what a "peanut gallery" is, but if you know how to do something 
which cannot be done then please share that with us so that we may update 
our apparently outdated rules of logic.


- Marcus Sundman