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

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <E1Jl3bC-0005N2-PJ@fencepost.gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> These two encodings have confusingly similar names, but significantly
> different semantics: one expects a BOM, the other does not.  (I'll bet
> a sixpack of beer that most of you will not know which one is which.)
> A similar problem exists with the -be variant of UTF-16.

The correct names for "without BOM" versions are utf-16le
and utf-16be (RFC2781).

The two coding systems utf-16-le and utf-16-be were
introduced as "with BOM" version by Dave.  I noticed that
those names are very confusing when I was going to introduce
"without BOM" versions as utf-16be and utf-16le.  But as it
was after the release of some official version of Emacs
(perhaps 21.3), to keep backward compatiblity, I couldn't
delete utf-16-be/le.  So, I renamed them as
utf-16be-with-signature and utf-16le-with-signature and make
utf-16-be and utf-16-le just their aliases hoping that new
people use only these names:
  utf-16 utf-16le utf-16be utf-16le-with-signature utf-16be-with-signature
  
Stefan, if you think it's ok to break backward compatiblity
here, I'll delete alises utf-16-be and utf-16-le.

---
Kenichi Handa
handa@ni.aist.go.jp