Re: ISO 2022 and termcap ballast

[Bram Moolenaar <Bram@moolenaar.net>]

Markus Kuhn wrote:

> Bram Moolenaar wrote on 1999-11-03 22:07 UTC:
> > Read which standard?  This can't be the only one.  Why else would there be
> > a termcap/terminfo database with so many entries?
> 
> Almost all termcap/terminfo entries are useless today, because these
> terminals do not exist any more. Almost everyone uses vt100, xterm,
> linux, or a very closely related terminal definition, and all of these
> are pretty much simple subsets of ISO 6429 and ISO 2022 with some
> private extensions (usually, but unfortunately not always, using one of
> the private extension sequences reserved by ISO 6429 and ISO 2022). The
> Linux console is a particularly bad offender, where some people
> introduced blindly private extension sequences with a syntax very far
> off the ISO standards (most likely due to ignorance of the standard and
> the ESC sequence syntax principles).

My experience is that there are more violiations of standards than correct
implementations.  That's the real world.  We have to deal with it.  We can't
use the execuse that they should have used the standard and that's their
problem.  We must help the people that sit behind a computer and try to make
the best of it.

Anyway, I have concluded that using ISO 2022 ESC sequences to recognize UTF-8
files (or files in any other encoding) isn't useful for Vim.

The discussion about whether a BOM can be used to recognize UTF-8 is still
open.  There are disadvantages and advantages, how these add up isn't clear
to me yet.

--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
87. Everyone you know asks why your phone line is always busy ...and
    you tell them to send an e-mail.

--/-/---- Bram Moolenaar ---- Bram@moolenaar.net ---- Bram@vim.org ---\-\--
  \ \    www.vim.org/iccf      www.moolenaar.net       www.vim.org    / /
-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/