Re: [boost] [rfc] I/O Library Design

From: Johan Råde (rade_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-20 17:02:08

Andrey Semashev wrote:
> 
> I'm not saying that we don't need Unicode support. We do!
> I'm only saying that in many cases plain ASCII does its job perfectly 
> well: logging, system messages, simple text formatting, texts in 
> restricted character sets, like numbers, phone numbers, identifiers of 
> all kinds, etc. There are cases where i18n is not needed at all - mostly 
> server-side apps with minimal UI. 

I agree.
There are other cases where you need single byte encodings.
In many kinds of scientific work you rarely need anything else than ASCII (or Latin-1).

In some kinds of scientific work it essential to use single byte encodings.
For instance when you need to index and search an annotated genome.
This involves a huge amount of text,
and anything else than a single byte encoding might kill performance.

The current C++ iostreams library needs to be replaced.
I agree that the locale and narrow/wide stuff is broken beyond repair.
But whatever is going to replace it,
needs to be flexible enough to handle many different encodings.

Unicode should of course be the base.
But we need at least ASCII, Latin-1, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS2 (for Windows compatibility) and UCS4.
And other users will undoubtedly have other needs.

It would be very interesting if the Boost community tackles this problem.
I will be excited to see the outcome of such an effort.

--
Johan Råde