From p.singleton@keele.ac.uk  Mon Dec 18 13:02:33 2000
Received: from scooby.lineone.net (doggy.lineone.net [194.75.152.224])
	by swi.psy.uva.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA27128;
	Mon, 18 Dec 2000 13:02:33 +0100 (MET)
Received: from keele.ac.uk (host212-140-28-206.btinternet.com [212.140.28.206])
	by scooby.lineone.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA05797;
	Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:02:16 GMT
Message-ID: <3A3B857C.5ACF6613@keele.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 15:08:44 +0000
From: Paul Singleton <p.singleton@keele.ac.uk>
Organization: SmartArts Computing Consultancy
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (WinNT; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: SWI Prolog <prolog@swi.psy.uva.nl>
CC: Jan Wielemaker <jan@swi.psy.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: swi jpl character coding
References: <200012161157.MAA01975@gollem.swi.psy.uva.nl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Jan Wielemaker wrote:

> One problem might be the textual
> representation of atoms containing illegal UTF-8 sequences.  It whould
> be nice if write_canonical and read can deal with *any* Prolog term.

[including floats, and cyclic and recombinant terms please! :-]

> Assuming UTF-8 you could make the atom start with an illegal sequence
> and add a foreign routine to return its type.

OK, that's neat: let's have UTF-8 for textual names, hooks for optional
custom handling of non-UTF-8 atoms (with some default catch-all handling).

NB is there some de facto standard type system we should be using, e.g.
those MIME type thingies?

Paul S.

