Re: utf-16le vs utf-16-le

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > Huh?  We don't have the full suite, but we do have -signature variants.
 > 
 > Bot for UTF-8, we don't, at least not in GNU Emacs 23.

We're not talking about GNU Emacs 23, we're talking about what should
be.  What I'm trying to say is that all of these variants are
occasionally useful, and they can be decomposed as text coding +
signature + EOL convention, rather than having a zillion variants with
weird names for the user to keep track of.

 > > Indeed?  Suppose I have a string as the value of the symbol `s'
 > > containing the octets "\r\n".  Please explain to me how to compute
 > > whether that is the value 0x0D0A from a network stream prepared using
 > > htons(3), or a line ending suitable for appending to a Windows file.
 > 
 > The Lisp code that created the string knows what it is and how to deal
 > with it.  But you already know that, so I probably simply fail to
 > follow your reasoning.

Let me quote you:

 > I'm afraid that this will be very hard to implement in Emacs, since
 > the internals are very much exposed and we are used to copy strings to
 > and fro freely.

 > I think we also don't have sockets and other similar interfaces as
 > Lisp object to which we could give properties.

That's a shame, isn't it?