Re: Tcl 8.6 vs 9.0 encoding plus some general confusion

* Rich <rich@example.invalid>
| Ralf Fassel <ralfixx@gmx.de> wrote:
| >     ## 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.

The tcl-9 manpage is not clear on this topic IMHO:

  https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html

On the one hand, it states for -encoding:
  https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html#M11
 
    If a file contains pure binary data (for instance, a JPEG image), the
    encoding for the channel should be configured to be iso8859-1. Tcl will
    then assign no interpretation to the data in the file and simply read or
    write raw bytes.

Two sentences later:
    It is usually better to set the -translation option to binary when
    you want to transfer binary data, as this turns off the other
    automatic interpretations of the bytes in the stream as well.

And for -translation:
  https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html#M17
    binary
      Like lf, no end-of-line translation is performed, but in addition,
      sets -eofchar to the empty string to disable it, and sets
      -encoding to iso8859-1.

This sounds to me that configuring only "-encoding iso8859-1" is *not*
enough to read binary data (since crlf translation and eofchar handling
might still apply), and that the "usually better" should really read
"necessary to".

R'