Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 16:03:42 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > That's not true: we try using UTF-8 wherever possible.  The few files
>  > that don't use that simply cannot.
> 
> That doesn't seem to be true.  In fact many of the encodings
> discovered by "grep -r -e '-\\*- coding:" are ISO 2022 conformant, and
> a few indeed appear to be EUC encodings under an alias (eg,
> chinese-iso-8bit-unix).  AFAICS, the only encodings listed that can't
> be encoded in UTF-8 are the Big 5 family -- and that's only if you
> demand bug-compatibility.[1]

First, you missed the file-local variables (the pattern you used with
Grep will only find the cookies on the first line).  Second, you
missed file-coding-system-alist, auto-coding-alist, and
auto-coding-regexp-alist, which set defaults for some files that
therefore no longer need to be explicitly stated in the file.

So please believe me when I say that the files encoded in anything
that isn't UTF-8 are those where using UTF-8 was impossible for some
specific reason (not the reasons you mention above).  You can look up
the related discussions in our list archives.

Btw, to find out how many of our files are in UTF-8 and how many
aren't, I would suggest to use tools that can explicitly tell the
encoding, rather than rely on Grep and on whatever you remember are
the ways of specifying a file's encoding.