From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <f11a34849d01662f0de4dd1a50795fa5@mightycheese.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] ... in the Kingdom of Sources
From: "rob pike, esq." <rob@mightycheese.com>
In-Reply-To: <eef4c9530db19c3c58ad2795f9876463@vitanuova.com>
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Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 08:48:43 -0700
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> i'm certainly glad that when i accidentally browse a piece of latin-1
> text in plan 9, i get almost all the text, with an occasional error
> character thrown in.

precisely.  the approach taken by the C standard implies you're
supposed to error check the conversion and presumably yell about it,
maybe exit.  but the great majority of text processing code is
interactive - editors, browsers, terminal programs - and must soldier
on.  the `error rune' solution not only solves the problem of
soldiering on, it provides a way to yell and takes no code at all in
the application.  (if you really want to stop processing on errors,
it's still a simple check; it's just that you almost never have to
bother to check and i can't think of a single program that does.)

-rob