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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:25:51 +0900
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I agree, as you state it, it's obvious.  My question is "why does that
> need to be part of the coding system?"

Well, consistency with other ``add-ons'', such as EOL format, is one
reason.

> At present the UTF-16 and
> UTF-32 Unicode coding systems (in the abstract) have *twenty-seven*
> variants each (BOM-required, BOM-prohibited, BOM-autodetected X be,
> le, system-dependent X CR, LF, CRLF), and UTF-8 needs *nine*.

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?

> What I proposed was a more generic concept where use of signatures and
> the EOL convention would (at least to the user) appear as buffer-local
> variables.

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.