Re: Coding system sniffing.

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: I hate to disturb your conversation -- but I want to add the voice of one European (German) user: Aidan expresses the problem, and you seem to reject work on it to get a Really Good Design. But it ain't so easy, from this user's perspective -- sometimes Worse Is Better, as we all have learned from Dick Gabriel. It is highly annoying that I need to explicitly, manually, specify the buffer-coding-system for a file when I want to insert an EUR sign and when I want it to end up encoded in ISO-8859-15. And that's the current state of affairs, AFAICS. Since many of us use templates for new files anyhow, it's a small matter to add an appropriate cookie to demand a specific encoding for a file. That this approach is effectively rejected by you, is really disturbing for us European users. Maybe one doesn't need it for Japanese scripts and for UTF-8, but for us poor souls who still want to use ISO-8859-* for other reasons, it would be a real advantage. Well, speaking of UTF-8: Since XEmacs is very happy to destroy lots of my files with its supposedly smart encoding detection -- and does so WITHOUT any warning -- your demand for more thought about error recovery is right on spot. But there seems to be other areas that are in more severe need of that error handling than recovery from wrong coding cookies (namely, automatic encoding sniffing). I have had literally dozens of UTF-8 files with one single Latin1 char in them, that got reencoded by XEmacs when I opened and saved them. (I.e., when I didn't pay enough attention to the modeline in the process of quickly modifying one or two words.) In all these cases, reliance on a user-supplied coding cookie would have saved me untold hours and hours of work to redo the result of XEmacs automatic encoding detection which Really Really Really Sucks. Throwing an error if the coding system is not sufficient is much preferred to the current state of affairs (arbitrarily choosing a coding system that XEmacs thinks is right). Sorry about sounding frustrated -- but I am, and your insistence on Sufficiently Smart Programs(tm) being the Right Way(tm) does not match my experience with XEmacs, or with programs at all. Please let us have our way to specify "yes, I want the buffer of this file in THIS coding system and be DAMNED if you try to switch on another one beneath my back. I know what I'm doing because I'M THE USER and I'M ALWAYS RIGHT BY DEFINITION because I know more about MY OWN FILES than you bloody stupid detection algorithm." Please. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod(a)acm.org Roedermark, Germany _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta