Re: Disambiguate modeline character for UTF-8?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 05 Jul 2023, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> UTF-8 is one of the most common encodings, and it is strange that it
>> shares its modeline indicator with anything else. And the "U" is really
>> ambiguous, because context won't help (or how would you decide if a
>> buffer's file encoding is e.g. koi8-u or utf-8?).

> Is the problem that koi8-u also uses 'U'?  That is, if we change
> koi8-u to some other character, will that be good enough?

It would help, but it would solve only part of the problem. (I had
suggested "K" for koi8 before.)

> The other encodings are all from the UTF family, so using 'U' for them
> all does make sense.

IMHO it doesn't make sense at all. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-7 are
completely different encodings which have nothing in common except
their name.

All I'm asking for is a unique indicator for UTF-8. Wouldn't this be
justified for the most common encoding (or maybe it's second after
ASCII)?

> (The lower-case 'u' for utf-7 is IMO simply a mistake, and can be
> fixed with a low risk, I think, since this encoding is rare.)