[Rd] SUGGESTION: Force install.packages() to use ASCII encoding when parse():ing code?

Bjørn-Helge Mevik b.h.mevik at usit.uio.no
Fri Dec 12 15:35:00 CET 2014


Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> writes:

> On 12/12/2014, 4:12 AM, Bjørn-Helge Mevik wrote:
>> Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> users of other languages may want to have messages and variable names
>>> in their native language, and ASCII might not be enough for that.
>> 
>> Allowing for messages in non-ASCII encodings would probably be a good
>> idea, but I think allowing non-ASCII variable names is dangerous.
>
> Dangerous in what way?

Perhaps "dangerous" is a little too strong, but it opens up
possibilities for problems with sharing code or running it on other
systems.  Also, judging by the many files I've seen (and created myself
:) with a mixture of iso8859-1 and utf8, or with "double-encoded" utf8,
it is surprisingly easy to make encoding mistakes when editing or
processing files.  And as Jan Kim wrote, you could get things that look
similar but are different.

-- 
Regards,
Bjørn-Helge Mevik



More information about the R-devel mailing list