[Mono-dev] mcs default encoding: Latin1 or not

[Kornél Pál]

Hi,

If you don't like ISO 28591 because it's foreign, why do you want to use
ASCII in source files?:)

I personally hate the fact of having code pages but this has historical
reasons. I think UTF-8 is a good solution as it is international,
culture-neutral and ASCII compatible.

I think we are living in the age of Unicode. So there is no reason to use
ASCII. It's OK to use only ASCII in identifiers and use English in comments
and texts but I don't think we shouldn't take advantage of Unicode. We can
use it for names for example.

I think mcs should use Encoding.Default as default encoding as I think this
is nearest to the user's need and provides compatiblity with csc.exe.
But we should use UTF-8 without signature (BOM) for our .cs source code
files and explicitly specify for mcs to use UTF-8.

Kornél

----- Original Message -----
From: "Atsushi Eno" <atsushi at ximian.com>
To: "mono-devel mailing list" <mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2005 9:25 PM
Subject: [Mono-dev] mcs default encoding: Latin1 or not


> After a few talk on irc with Miguel I reverted default encoding part
> from locale dependent encoding to Latin1 (codepage 28591) and decided
> to start a long ;-) discussion.
>
> I still (of course;) don't think we should use Latin1 as default
> encoding, since it is totally foreign in some non-EuroAmerican
> people like me.  .NET csc defaults it to the native encoding.
> For some people in Boston maybe it is Latin1, while for example
> I have Shift_JIS (it is  kinda standard encoding in Japan, along
> with EUC-JP on Unix).
>
> We certainly have several Latin1 source files, thus for mcs itself
> it would be safer just to keep using codepage 28591. But I don't
> think either that mcs is just for mcs itself, or that mcs is just
> for Latin1 people.
>
> Changing the default encoding will bring some confusion on those
> people who used to write sources in Latin1 encoding, not limited
> to mcs. But it is not culture-neutral solution to keep using
> Latin1 as the default.
>
> It will even bring confusion on such ASP.NET applications which
> were written in Latin1 encoding. That is what we Japanese had
> actually experienced. It never worked without changing fileEncoding
> in web.config or changing all sources from shift_jis to utf-8.
> Latin1 people had been happy while we weren't.
>
> Well, actually changing default encoding is not likely to help
> us anyways, since on large amount of modern Linux environment
> the default encoding is likely to be UTF-8.
>
> Thus I think the decision is, whether we are for culture
> neutralism, or for convenience of Latin1 people. There is no
> reason I stand for the latter, at least based on the factors
> I listed above.
>
> Atsushi Eno
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