From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <60daeacb70b35a962967fe444d298342@mightycheese.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] ... in the Kingdom of Sources From: "rob pike, esq." In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 08:50:35 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 30001d74-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Since an encoding error should "never" occur, we thought it > better to stop scanning rather that plow ahead and convert some > unknown amount of garbage once synchronization has been lost. > It was also not evident that there would always be a "spare" > wide-character code available for in-band signaling. experience tells that 'never' happens many times a day. for most tools, let's say, oh, a terminal program, cat, grep, web browser, ..., you should most certainly plow ahead. for the few programs that absolutely must not make mistakes, it's still possible to discover an error has occurred (error rune + only one byte consumed). the point - often lost on standards committees - is that convenience is often more important than universality or rigidity. i admit that our strategy is tied to utf-8. -rob