Re: utf-16le vs utf-16-le

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:01:14 +0900
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > Which 9 are needed by UTF-8?  I only see 4: the auto-detecting one,
>  > then one each for -unix. -dos, and -mac.  What am I missing?
> 
> BOM-{prohibited,auto,required}.

But we don't have these in Emacs, do we?

>  > Don't forget that en/decoding is used on strings as well, not only on
>  > buffers.  Buffer-local variables won't cut it, I think.
> 
> Strings don't have encoding signatures or newline variants

??? Of course, they do.  Emacs has no way of knowing what will be done
with the encoded string; in particular, you might well insert it into
a buffer or append it to a file.  Are you saying that Emacs should, at
the time of actual use of the string re-en/decode it according to
usage?

> those octet sequences if present in a string are merely binary octet
> sequences.  They only have special semantics in external
> representations.  Where's the problem?

A string can be sent to a process, for example, so we must have some
way of generating an external representation for it.