GNU bug report logs - #22436
read-coding-system uses wrong default when called from write-file

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Message #35 received at 22436 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: rcopley <at> gmail.com, 22436 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22436: read-coding-system uses wrong default when called from
 write-file
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2016 14:55:50 +0100

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> (Anyway, when you say "most people", did you consider how many people
> in the world consider chinese-iso-8bit a very good first choice? ;-)

:-)

>> Which would be utf8 on most systems, and possibly ucs16 on Windows,
>> I dunno.
>
> Using UTF-16 on Windows would be disastrous: almost no program,
> certainly not those which are ports of GNU software, can do anything
> useful with such an encoding.  Emacs is the only exception I know of.

Right.  I thought I had read somewhere that Windows was UTF-16-ey, but I
know nothing about Windows...

>> So `chinese-iso-8bit' is a surprising default.
>
> It's not a default.
>
>> Could the default be improved upon?
>
> We can sort the list differently.  But if all we want is to always get
> UTF-8 at the head, there's a much easier way, see my other message
> where I mentioned prefer-coding-system.

I guess I'm just saying that I think the least surprising default coding
system here would be utf-8.  So Emacs should offer that as the first
option unless the user has said otherwise.  That is, Emacs should say
utf-8 unless the user has called `prefer-coding-system' with something
else.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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