I cannot imagine why would anyone want to use any encoding other than utf-8
for their code. As for Ruby 1.9 - I think it makes sense to simply set the
magic comment to utf-8 if a file contains non-ascii characters. Keep in
mind that I'm not suggesting to remove the functionality, but simply to
disable it by default, since it's not something that most Ruby hackers
today would want to use.


On 1 November 2013 19:46, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> > Since Ruby 1.8 reached end of life in the summer and most projects these
> > days use Ruby 2.0 (which assumes source files use utf8 by default) having
> > ruby-insert-encoding-magic-comment’ doesn’t make much sense.  Most people
> > just disable it anyways, so why not have it disabled by default?
>
> IIUC, Ruby-2.0 doesn't require source code to be utf-8, so the
> magic-comment is not obsolete.  IOW, what needs to be done is to make
> Emacs prefer utf-8 for ruby files (it's probably the case already), and
> to make ruby-mode-set-encoding only insert the magic comment if it is
> different from utf-8.
>
>
>         Stefan "not a Ruby user"
>
>
> PS: The `ruby' package in Debian stable is still at 1.9.1.
>