🚀 go-pugleaf

The issue of the 8th bit is not the real problem.  It's clear that all
the programs that hack the 8th bit will have to be rewritten.

The ideal objective is for the same binaries to run anywhere in the
world, in any font or language or currency or date/time format.
[For now, let's not get off into currency/date/time conversions, and
just talk about character set representation issues.]

What will cause a LOT of grief is fitting the large Asian character
sets in.  I saw a memo purported to come from somewhere in AT&T that
seemed to be a mix of realism and brain damage.  Some of the brain
damage included:

     *	a "long char" data type for C -- haven't they ever heard of "short"?

     *	No "locking" select-character-set codes embedded in data streams
	(like what you'd send to a terminal to enter the "graphics character
	set").  Instead, they had two different ways to encode extended
	character sets (beyond 8-bit), and a bit OUTSIDE THE DATA STREAM
	(eg in the inode of a disk file) that said which format a file
	was in.  The two formats were for places where 8-bit or >8-bit
	character sets were the norm.

I don't think either of those is a viable idea, but I'm not sure that
a single representation will suffice UNLESS there are locking character set
selections (so the first few bytes of your file would describe its
default character sets, if strange).  Once you open that can, various
other worms come out, like making sure those specs get propagated
when you cut and paste in an editor, etc.

It's quite a job when you realize that unless ALL the Unix utilities
process Asian characters as characters, the system will lose.  Any
volunteers to hack grep for 16-bit characters encoded in an 8-bit
data stream with case shifts?

Of course stdio would be modified to encode and decode the extended
character set, and that will do much of the work for us.  Maybe that
should be our first research project -- a public domain stdio that
defines a standard programming interface to 16-bit characters and a
standard datastream representation for them.