Design Goals and Philosophy

The goal of this library are to

• enable people to write new code that can properly handle encoded information, specifically text;

• offer them effective means to convert that information in various ways;

• impose no run-time overhead compared to writing the code by hand; and

• statically track encodings, where possible, to make lossless or bad conversions a compile time error rather than a runtime problem;

These four goals inform the design of the library to its deepest levels and helps us go through the following important tenents:

Contents:

• First Principles - “Lucky 7” and a Liberation-First Design
• Bulk vs. Single Conversions
• Lost Information
• Error Handling
• Converting, Counting, and Validating Text
• Strong vs. Weak Code Units/Points and Legacy Encodings
• Lucky 7 Extension - Beyond the Basics