Such a change inhernetly causes widespread disruption.
Again, you are assuming what you are trying to prove, which is no way to
argue.
This is a decision that has to be based on engineering judgement.
There's no way to "prove" whether any particular choice will be
successful or not because you can't adequately model the real-world
conditions.
Ned said, right at the start of this thread, that introducing UTF-8 was
not inherently hard or difficult, but that there were a certain number of
problems that would need to be tackled, amongst which would likely be a
suitable means of falling back to a 7-bit encoding.
Well, as long as we're complaining about argument techniques, what I said
was that it isn't hard to introduce but I'd yet to see evidence that the
benefits outweight the costs. You're quoting out of context.
It's not difficult to define how it would need to work, and it's not
particularly difficult to write the code. Introducing the code without
significant disruption is extremely difficult, and the benefit doesn't
justify the cost.
Exactly. There's a huge difference between defining the mechanism and
writing the code and actually suffering through the deployment. I probably
see sllightly less disruption in store than Keith does, but I probably also
see less overall benefit. So it's a wash -- I agree with Keith's assessment
of this.
This is what has stopped me writing the relatively trivial documents needed to
specify a mechanism for this. Getting the mechanism right isn't exactly rocket
science, you know.
Ned