The Case For Autodecode

[Observer via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 3 June 2016 at 11:24:40 UTC, ag0aep6g wrote:
> Finally, this is not the only argument in favor of *keeping* 
> autodecoding, of course. Not wanting to break user code is the 
> big one there, I guess.

I'm not familiar with the details of autodecoding, but one thing
strikes me about this whole discussion.  It seems to me that it
is just nibbling around the edges of how one should implement full
Unicode support.  And it seems to me that that topic, and how
autodecoding plays into it, won't be properly understood except by
comparison with mature software that has undergone many years of
testing and revision.  Two examples stand out to me:

* Perl 5 has undergone a gradual evolution, over many releases,
   to get this right.  It might also be the case that Perl 6 is
   even cleaner.

* The International Components for Unicode (ICU) package, with
   supported libraries for C, C++, and Java.  This is the industry-
   standard definition of what it means to handle Unicode in these
   languages.  See http://site.icu-project.org/ for details.

Both of these implementations have seen many years of real-world
use, so I would tend to look to them for guidance over trying to
develop my own opinion based on some small set of particular use
cases I might happen to have encountered.