Re: Can't make emacs use utf-8?? (on WinXP)

[Jason Rumney]

Bjoern <p2@blinker.net> writes:

> > There are even those, like me, that believe that the language of
> > identifiers and comments should be simple English anyway, to maximize
> > reusability.
> 
> True, I wasn't even thinking about that, but what about
> 
> System.out.println("some non-ASCII text here");

This is better suited to a Java newsgroup, but the answer is it
depends.

By default, the java compiler uses the user's default locale to guess
the encoding, which in a large enough team is somewhat random, but can
be forced to use a particular encoding by using a compiler
switch.  There is also some randomness in what encoding other
people's editors will write code out as.

So if you are a team of one, you can probably manage to set your
environment up so that non-ASCII just works, but as soon as other
people start working on the code you are opening a can of worms by
allowing non-ASCII characters in the source without encoding them
as \uNNNN.