Re: [gnu.org #1363250] ASCII maintain.txt is no longer ASCII

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 12:48:31PM -0500, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
     I cannot think of any kind of terminal in the last 30 years that is
     unable to display UTF-8 properly.

There are two issues here.  Firstly the terminal has to decode the UTF-8
into the relavant unicode number.  This is straightforward, so I think
you're right  - its unlikely that any modern terminal cannot do this.

Secondly, it must map that number to an appropriate glyph and render
that glyph on its hardware.  There are over 137,000 glyphs in unicode.  I 
would be extremely surprised if any terminal, old or new, can do this
properly in every case.  Terminals are getting better all the time, but
none are perfect.

So I'm of the opinion that we should use non-ascii if it delivers some 
advantage, but in the other cases let's be conservative and stick to
what we know will work for everyone.

A classic case is the copyright symbol.  I see some text files which
are all ascii except for this character.  This symbol serves no purpose
except an aesthetic one.