Re: Casting as wide a net as possible

[Random832 <random832@fastmail.com>]

Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm> writes:
> On 14/12/2015 21:01 +0600, Yuri Khan wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>> When I started using Emacs, it attracted me with the ease of working
>>> with codings.  I've tried some editors at that time, of course
>>> (including well-known IDEs, for years), but never before it was so easy
>>> to just open a file in a given coding, or re-open it in another.  We,
>>> non-English-natives, still have problems with different encodings (yes,
>>> KOI8-R, CP-1251 and CP-866 for Russian are still here) and Emacs helped
>>> me to learn more clearly what the encoding is.
>>
>> English natives have worse problems with encodings.
>
> What do you mean?  Just interesting.

The definition of "worse" is subjective, but I think what he's
referring to is the fact that someone might open a file in the
wrong encoding, without noticing or caring that some accented
word or punctuation symbol in some paragraph deep within the
file looks wrong, add more content in the new encoding, save
it... then you have a file which has a mixture of bytes in
different encodings, which is very difficult to fix
automatically.

Whereas, if you open a file in Cyrillic (or, say, Japanese), you
know immediately that it's in the wrong encoding and won't do
any editing until the coding situation is fixed.