[Rd] UTF-8 and .Rd files

[François Pinard]

[Spencer Graves]

> [...] I, too, would like to see all the accents, Arabic script, 
> Chinese characters, etc., that other people want to use.  However, we 
> must work with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be 
> (while devoting some time where appropriate to making the world 
> better, as everyone who contributes to the R Project does).

Granted and agreed.  Yet, R already does already a little more than 
a few other programming languages in this area, and this is particularly 
sympathetic! :-)  One could hope and wish that R developers, within 
reasonable efforts, continue making R better and even make it take some 
lead in this area.  Not going fanatic about it of course, but at least, 
carefully avoiding any backward move in development, or changes that 
would be unfriendly to internationalisation of R.

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca