[GRASS-user] Re: GCC vs. locale

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com> writes:

 >>> ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so there's no problem with using the
 >>> ASCII quote characters in that situation.

 >> That's the problem -- ASCII lacks single quote characters.

 > It also lacks a decimal point character. But just as a full stop
 > (period) suffices as a decimal point, the apostrophe suffices as a
 > single quote character (e.g. C/C++, Bourne shell, etc).

	I'd let the programming languages alone, since otherwise I'd
	probably blame C compilers for not supporting comma as the
	decimal separator.  Besides, the choice of particular ASCII
	characters for particular purposes is somewhat arbitrary within
	the scope.

 > It's not as if you actually *need* to use balanced quotes.

	As I've said previously, I see this behaviour as consistent with
	the rest of the system.  I see no necessity in it, yes.

 >> PS.  Is `utf8' a valid MIME charset name?

 > iconv understands it as an alias for utf-8. I don't know whether MIME
 > specifies an exhaustive list of encodings.

	MIME relies on IANA to define the convention on naming character
	sets.  I've just checked it at [1], and it seems that there's no
	such MIME charset.  Hence, the behaviour of Gnus is justified.

 > FWIW, the fact that VM chose UTF-8 was news to me; historically, it
 > has used ISO-2022 for multi-lingual text.

	It might be caused by the presense of the quote symbols.
	(Especially if they cannot be represented by ISO-2022; sorry, I
	know little about that character set to make a better guess.)

[1] http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets