On Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:35:49 +1000, Martin Duerst <duerst / it.aoyama.ac.jp>  
wrote:

>
> Therefore, I think we should seriously consider this proposal,
> and hopefully implement it before Sept. 25th. In terms of
> implementation, I don't think it should be that difficult,
> but it may be quite a bit of work to check
> Encoding::default_internal in all the affected methods.

Wow, that is rather ambitious - 3 days?
The bulk of the implementation will be in the libraries, and I think many  
of them need updating to cope with non-acsii encodings anyhow.

> - We should think through various scenarios for output.
>   I can't think of any problems just now, I just noticed
>   the absence of considerations for output below.

I did think about output to a certain extent, and one good thing is that  
IO already seems to automatically transcode to the "external" encoding at  
the moment. As for other classes, again I think most need updating to  
support multiple encodings anyhow. They will at a minimum need a way of  
having the user pass the "external" encoding (defaulting to  
"default_external"), and do the transcode as necessary, based on the  
encoding of the data to be output. However, as with IO, this behaviour  
probably should happen no matter whether "default_internal" is implemented  
or not.

Cheers
Mike