[Asterisk-Dev] Alphanumeric Extensions Proposal Comments

[Michael Giagnocavo]

In response to Olle and Leif's proposal:

http://edvina.net/asterisk/alphanumericextensions.pdf

Starting with Asterisk dialplans being ASCII.. Why? Wouldn't that make it
relatively hard to use any other characters in Asterisk, if your dialplan is
so limited? I'd imagine we'd want the same format for other files too. Thus,
I don't understand how starting off with ASCII gets us going anywhere good.

The fact that some Caller ID implementations might use an old encoding like
ISO 8859-1 shouldn't determine how Asterisk handles things internally. One
of the nice things about Asterisk is that it's designed quite well and aims
to do things correctly, even when a lot of other surrounding things, well,
aren't done so well. 

Quite frankly, I think that Unicode is one thing that should just be there,
in the background, working. In the dialplan and elsewhere, we shouldn't have
to manipulate those strings any differently. Asterisk should use Unicode all
over, and when something needs a string in a different format, then Asterisk
converts. That'd keep a lot more in line with what Asterisk does regarding
other things (say, protocols and codecs) than making us (as users of
Asterisk) worry about the details of certain protocols.

-Michael