Re: Tcl 8.6 vs 9.0 encoding plus some general confusion

Ralf Fassel <ralfixx@gmx.de> wrote:

and I don't understand this at all.  If I say "-encoding
iso8859-1", am I not saying that the data is textual, and that Tcl
should parse it from "iso8859-1" into the internal Unicode as it
reads it?

 
Looking at the TCL sources for 9.0 and 8.6, it seems that the
'binary' encoding always has been an alias for 'iso8859-1', which has
finally been removed in TCL 9, cf.  changes.md:
 
    ## Notable incompatibilities
     - Removed the encoding alias `binary` to `iso8859-1`.

This feels like unnecesary exposure of internal details that an end
user is not concerned about.

A user wants to read "binary" data, it would seem that they would
expect to use "binary" as the name for that "encoding" (well, really, a
lack of any encoding).  If it indeed was mapped to iso8859-1
internally, that is an internal implemntation detail that is of no
concern to them.  Instead, I expect we will start to see a lot of
confusion from user's wondering why they are setting a "character
encoding" when they really wanted to read "binary" data.

Effectively nothing should have changed, except you can no longer
say
   chan -encoding binary
in tcl 9 (should have used "-translation binary" anyway).

Keeping the external "binary" alias visible would have been the better
option in my opinion.  Even if it was nothing more than an alias for
iso8859-1.