Re: New escape method proposal

[Paul Eggert]

On 04/23/2014 10:43 AM, Paul Smith wrote:
> Actually the restriction is already there in make since make doesn't do
> anything at all special for multibyte today, and does a lot of string
> parsing based on standard ASCII characters.  For example make already
> matches against "}" which is ASCII 125; if that appeared as the second
> byte in a multi-byte encoding it would break make today.
I wouldn't worry about encodings like ISO-2022 and Shift-JIS that reuse 
bytes in the standard character set to mean something else.  Generally 
speaking, only specialized text-processing tools like Emacs can deal 
with these encodings.  General POSIX utilities (e.g., grep, sh, awk, 
sort) blithely mishandle them and it's simply not worth the maintenance 
effort (and performance downgrading) to fix this.