[Tutor] Unknown encoded file types.

[Alan Gauld]

On 11/02/2021 03:26, Richard Damon wrote:

> This issue is more of a problem on Windows, because Windows roots go
> back significantly farther (especially in international markets) and
> thus has more legacy issues. The *nix world had the advantage of going
> international later, and at that point UTF-8 was a good option and got
> around the code page encoding issues.

That's an interesting perspective but I'm struggling to see the logic?
I'd agree that Windows tends to have a bigger legacy problem, but not
because of its age but because it did nothing to mitigate the issue
early on(in the MS DOS days). Rather it catered to a large number of
local standards and even used those internally.

But Unix was used all around the world in the late 70's and long
before DOS even became an idea, let alone an established product.
They just took a different approach to separating the concerns of
representing international alphabets within the system as opposed
to in user content - an approach based on decades of experience
in that field as a telco (eg. In the international telex network).

Both systems have identical issues in managing mixed encodings
in their file content. Windows has a slightly bigger problem
in managing mixed encodings in its filenames and other
internal features. How much bigger is a moot point. And both
utilise i18n for internationalization of software.

-- 
Alan G
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