Subject: Re: (i18n 97) Re: data announcement

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 91 11:13:05 EDT

On Jun 13,  9:14am, Walt Daniels wrote:
Subject: (i18n 97) Re: data announcement

% It is high time that Unix took one more step into the 20th century
% before the 21st arrives.  The fiction that all files are just byte
% streams is just that, fiction.  The user just has to know what files
% are binary and what files are text (line oriented) files.  Just try
% the split command on an arbitrary file.  If you are lucky it will find
% NLs sufficiently often to not abend due to overflowing a static
% buffer.
% 
% Just because this is a hard migration step for Unix does not mean that
% we should not spec it out and start pushing for its inclusion in the
% next POSIX release.
End of excerpt from Walt Daniels

  It would be highly inappropriate for this change proposal to be put
through POSIX because POSIX is chartered to standardise "existing
practice in historical UN*X systems" -- not CHANGE existing practice.

  It might or might not be a good idea, but POSIX is the *wrong* venue
to discuss it -- for that matter it isn't clear to me how any of this
relates to either ISO 10646 or UNICODE or SMTP Mail.  
Further discussion probably belongs elsewhere.

Randall Atkinson
[email-masked]