[Openmcl-devel] *default-character-encoding* should be :utf-8

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 5 Mar 2012, at 12:55, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

> - if a locale is specified, it's the same for all the POSIX programs
>  running on that system.  The editor will save by default a file in the
>  encoding specified by LC_ALL or else LC_CTYPE or else LANG, and ccl
>  will load it in the same encoding  specified by LC_ALL or else
>  LC_CTYPE or else LANG.  For naive users it's the best.

Naïve users who only use one machine, may be. Unfortunately the kind of naïve users I deal with tend to write programs which themselves run on multiple machines, and which have to deal (very badly, in general) with data coming from many more.  Needless to say these systems are extremely fragile about encodings given that none of the programmers understood the issue, and it's witnessing that kind of fragility which makes me argue for leaving things as they are.  As I said, my preferred approach would involve a backpack nuke, but if I could afford one of those I'd not be doing the job I am.