A Philosophy of Software Design

[Walter Bright]

On 6/29/2026 11:31 PM, Jon Degenhardt wrote:
> If only one strategy is going to be supported by library code, the best choice 
> is pass-through, not replacement. That way the application layer can do post 
> filtering and handle the error itself. Replacement is information lossy and 
> cannot be undone or compensated for at the application level. Note that it is 
> common for applications that act as intermediate text processing steps are 
> required to support pass-through behavior.

The replacement happens only when decoding is required by the algorithm. A text 
substring search, for example, does not do decoding. It's just an array of bytes.