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

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 6 Mar 2012, at 04:30, Gary Byers wrote:

> I wouldn't claim that it happens that often (probably no more than a few times
> a year, and maybe less each passing year), but there are bug reports  on this
> list, in Trac, and sent to me personally from people who have never thought about
> any of this before and seem genuinely surprised when they're told that then need
> to start doing so.

And that's the point.  People who write systems which spend all their time dealing with currency symbols (which are pretty much inevitably mangled if you change encoding) are utterly unaware of these things.  Really utterly unaware: their systems work by people fiddling randomly until things work and then having good enough change management that nothing is ever changed again.

I'd love to argue that these people should just be educated, and ten years ago I would have argued just that.  But short of some kind of year-zero type revolution I'm now convinced this will not change for a long, long time.

That's why, although I don't personally mind either way (pretty much none of my code has characters which are not ASCII, but if it did I would be able to cope), I'd suggest not changing the default, but assuming that users who want a better default can put the (single line, right?) they need in their init file.