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

[Magnus Therning]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 09:56:15PM +0300, Marcus Sundman wrote:
>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we may update our apparently outdated rules of logic.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=peanut%20gallery

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
address@hidden
http://magnus.therning.org/

To the consumer, cryptography is a shadowy protective entity -- something
like Batman -- kind of menacing but on the side of justice, and endowed
with mystic powers.
     -- Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies

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