Yes there was no mention of BOMs, but there *was* mention of
#position, and the presence or absence of byte order marks
makes a difference.
As for mailing list discussions over a year, that is not the
kind of single coherent source I was hoping for.
As someone *using* the system classes, I don't give a damn
how big they are.�� What I care about is the complexity of
*my* code, and it looks as though the new interface will
make my code bigger, more error-prone, and less portable.
As for the "big hairy classes" sneer, the file stream
classes put together in my system are about the same size
as the Dictionary class proper.
I don't "want to make users set environment variables".
What I was suggesting was that if a user does go to the
trouble of setting relevant environment variables, the
system should have the decency to pay attention to them.
handling /dev/std... is pretty trivial in UNIX; in Windows
nothing about stdin is easy (XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 differ
amongst themselves in several annoying ways).
I can make no sense of the comment that interpreting #'text'
as #utf8 (always, as a design choice) or as whatever the
user chose for $LC_CTYPE (always, as a design choice) is
"not very Smalltalk like".�� Both design choices are fully
consistent with the standard -- to the limited extent that
UTF8 processing *can* be consistent with the standard.