Re: IUTF8 pseudo-terminal mode

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

> This is compounded by the fact that there is no equivalent of "C" for
> UTF-8 in glibc: that is, there's no way to say "I just want a
> basically unlocalised system that happens to use the UTF-8 encoding
> for everything".

I suspect part of the reason for this is the difference between octet
streams and character streams.

Older Unices, and even some current ones, don't use character strings
for things like usernames and filenames.  They use octet strings, with
conversion to characters happening very late on display and conversion
from characters happening very early on input, getting whatever
octet<->character mapping the display and input devices happen to use.

And that doesn't work at all well when you have an octet<->character
mapping that doesn't map each to exactly one of the other - such as
UTF-8.

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