> I don't think this is a misdesign. In most cases files are either seekable
> or small enough so that reading the variables from the end is tolerable. I
> prefer the end of files for local variables because they tend to be less
> important than the actual content.
I'm not talking about file-local variables in general. I'm talking
about the "coding:" pseudo-variable.
No matter how we choose to call it: My argument stands, reading such pseudo-variables from the end of the file is desirable, useful, and has negligible disadvantages. Or do we have evidence that users routinely read very large (gigabyte-sized) Elisp files from non-seekable sources?