Re: [Emacs-diffs] master db828f6: Don't rely on defaults in decoding UTF-8 encoded Lisp files

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden wrote:
> Perhaps most
> recently authored pages are UTF-8.  But the data sets themselves are
> typically flat files, either CSV or plaintext.  The explanatory pages,
> even if in HTML, often haven't been revised in decades.

Yes, that's pretty much my experience.  In Japan older stuff is mostly 
Shift-JIS, EUC, or maybe ISO-2022-JP.  New stuff is mostly UTF-8.  People using 
old email software send old encodings because that's what they've been doing for 
decades.  Normally it works, because the email envelope tells you the encoding. 
 But sometimes people screw up and you get mojibake.

But this situation is not an argument for having the locale determine encoding 
when visiting random imported files that lack envelopes.  For such files, it 
often doesn't work to set LC_ALL=ja_JP.ujis and expect Emacs to get things 
right.  (This is one of things that Eli has noted multiple times, and he's right.)

Of course if one is working in a conservative Japanese government ministry that 
standardized on Shift-JIS back in 1992 and hasn't changed since then, then 
things are different, and Emacs should support such users.  But typical Emacs 
users are not in this situation, and the Emacs default should cater to the 
more-typical case today.

To narrow things down a bit I briefly looked for .jp websites that talk about 
Emacs.  Google reported the following first page's worth of hits (I list year of 
composition, encoding, and URL).  Again, the new stuff is mostly UTF-8, and the 
old stuff is a mishmash, so it's another data point suggesting that defaulting 
to UTF-8 would not be such a bad thing for editing today's text.

2002 Shift-JIS   http://www.rsch.tuis.ac.jp/~ohmi/literacy/emacs/quick.html
2008 ISO-2022-JP http://www.wakayama-u.ac.jp/~takehiko/webprg/03.html
2015 EUC-JP      http://d.hatena.ne.jp/tarao/20150221/1424518030
2015 UTF-8       http://uguisu.skr.jp/Windows/emacs.html
2015 UTF-8 
http://www.amazon.co.jp/Emacs%E5%AE%9F%E8%B7%B5%E5%85%A5%E9%96%80-%EF%BD%9E%E6%80%9D%E8%80%83%E3%82%92%E7%9B%B4%E6%84%9F%E7%9A%84%E3%81%AB%E3%82%B3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E5%8C%96%E3%81%97%E3%80%81%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BA%E3%82%92%E5%8A%A0%E9%80%9F%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B-WEB-DB-PRESS-plus/dp/4774150029
2015 UTF-8       http://www.sigasi.jp/better-emacs-vhdl-mode
2006 Shift-JIS 
http://www.math.kobe-u.ac.jp/icms2006/icms2006-video/slides/grayson/share/doc/Macaulay2/Macaulay2/html/_teaching_spemacs_sphow_spto_spfind_sp__M2.html
2015 UTF-8       https://osdn.jp/projects/gnupack/