From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:22:44 +0000
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>
Message-ID: <46EE9A41.7DD78E60@null.net>
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References: <8ccc8ba40709161155t356da3dcvc9735a2fe4f42a03@mail.gmail.com>,
	<88ec1a25417025b5f86c7cdf76b249ff@quanstro.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] simplicity
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erik quanstrom wrote:
> i think the devolution of gnu grep is quite instructive.  ...
> it gets to the heart of why plan9's invention and use (thank's rob, ken) of
> utf-8 is so great.

If the problem is that Gnu grep converts any non-8-bit character set
to wchar_t (the equivalent of Plan 9 "rune"), then it's not really a
fair criticism of the software.  The conversion approach handles a
wide variety of character encoding scheme, whereas grepping the
encodings directly (the fast approach) doesn't work well for many
non-UTF-8 encodings.