On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I agree that the Far Eastern systems that can't easily be replaced
> by Unicode are that way mostly because they're a mess. But I'm
> still of the opinion that locking ourselves into Unicode is a choice
> we might regret, far down the road.
It's not a choice that has any obvious upside, so I have no reason to
disagree. My point was only that Robert's contention that "You could
argue that text-under-LATIN1 and text-under-UTF8 aren't really the
same data type at all" seems wrong to me, because PostgreSQL seems to
want to treat encoding as a property of the machine. This is evidenced
by the fact that we expect applications to change client encoding
"transparently". That is, client encoding may be changed without in
any way affecting humans that speak a natural language that is
provided for by the application's client encoding. That's a great
ideal to have, and one that is very close to completely workable.
--
Peter Geoghegan
VMware vCenter Server
https://www.vmware.com/