Re: ruby-mode : ruby-mode-set-encoding

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > Interesting.  Why don't they just force the use of some arbitrarily
 > chosen variant of Unicode?

To avoid "arbitrarily" breaking software systems and development
environments that target other character sets.

Specifically, you can automatically add an all-ASCII comment
containing a coding cookie to every Python source file without
breaking anything anywhere.  You cannot simply run all files through
recode, as that will break strings that display on legacy terminals or
have been interned in databases.