>On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Peter Seebach wrote:

>> On the other hand, we might want locale support in the kernel, in case
>> we ever end up supporting EBCDIC.

>Is it me, or is this just plain silly? (1/2 :-)

It's mostly silly.

There are good reasons to start on this *now*, rather than later.  Anyone
remember how hard it was, only a few short years ago, to find 8-bit clean
applications?  Well, in a few years, we're going to be looking at a
similar problem in terms of Unicode support and all sorts of other things.

EBCDIC is a relatively *easy* way to start on the problem of teaching the
kernel either:
1.  That there is more than one character set.
or (and this is harder)
2.  That there is more than one character set in use at a given time.

I *want* to be able to have two terminals on one NetBSD system, one using
ISO 8859-1, and one using 8859-2.  I want to start looking at the issues.

Maybe most of them  (all of them?) won't be kernel issues.  Cool.  But just
in case, we should start thinking about it.

Plan 9 has demonstrated that it's possible to have a small system which
uses 16 bit values for characters.  I think we should consider being ready
for this one.

Not that a lot of time should go into this at the expense of other things,
but it might not hurt to keep it in mind, and avoid closing any useful
doors.  :)

-s