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From: Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com>
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Subject: Re: Default coding system ?
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 18:08:59 +0100
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"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> I agree with Francois that it's a mess.
>
> Care to explain why?

1. Non-unification of characters.  Completely baffling for most
   people.

2. It's iso-2022 based.  Iso-2022 concepts are strange and unfamiliar
   to non-CJK users.

3. Terminology.  No ordinary user knows what a »coding system« is,
   they might know what a »character set« is (in the MIME sense).  And
   it's confusing that the term »character set« in Emacs does not
   correspond to the ordinary meaning.

   Also, why invent new names for coding systems, when what most
   people will be familiar with are MIME names, e.g. korean-iso-8bit
   vs. euc-kr.

4. Conflation of coding system and EOL convention.  I don't know any
   other application than Emacs that mix these two concepts.

5. unibyte-mode.  A frequent source of errors.  XEmacs is even worse
   since you can compile it without MULE.

>> Also, stuff like CCL and MULE isn't particularly well documented.
>
> So you do blame the documentation...

Well, CCL isn't documented *at all* -- all you get is the BNF syntax
stuffed away in a docstring somewhere.