bug#24953: 25.1; Possible inefficiency in UTF-8

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Eli Barzilay <eli@barzilay.org>
> Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2016 14:59:58 -0500
> Cc: 24953@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> > Yes.  (And it should be the default on GNU/Linux, at least on most of
> > its flavors.)
> 
> I built and installed 25.1, and it looks like the default is also
> English.  (At least according to `current-language-environment'.)  Is
> that a bug then?

It's not a bug.  The important thing is the various coding-systems: if
your locale is something like en_US.UTF-8, then the default encodings
should all be utf-8, which is what you want.

> >> (I originally thought that all it gets me is a default encoding for
> >> non-ascii files...)
> >
> > You could customize just that, then.
> 
> Using `prefer-coding-system'?  Or something else?

Using setq-default.

> > And I don't really understand why that is needed, either, unless you
> > want the files you create to be automatically in UTF-8.
> 
> Doesn't that make sense if I almost always edit source code for
> languages that use utf-8 to read sources?

Languages that use utf-8 should already encode in utf-8 by default.
Which ones don't?