On 2013-01-21 05:48:14 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > You said: > > > > | The original encoded form of the characters as found on disk at > > | visit time _cannot_ be recovered by saving with raw-text, because > > | that encoded form is lost without a trace when the file is _visited_ > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > | and decoded into the internal representation. > > > > This is what lossy is. > > In that sense, every encoding except no-conversion is lossy.
Even 8-bit encodings such as latin-1? > > On the opposite, the utf-8 encoding doesn't seem to be lossy: Emacs > > seems to handle files with invalid UTF-8 sequences without any loss. > > So, this encoding is safe, even if Emacs wrongly guess the encoding. > > No, it isn't, although you could get away with it most of the time. Could you give an example where one loses data with the utf-8 encoding? > > But Emacs should clearly tell the user what to do after C-x C-s and > > clearly say when there can be data loss. > > At save time, "data loss" is wrt what's in the buffer. In that sense, > the encodings Emacs suggested don't lose any data. "data loss" is the difference between the original file and the saved file. > > Then Emacs says: "Select one of the safe coding systems listed below > > [...]", but doesn't say that something has already been lost. So, the > > words "safe coding systems" are really misleading. > > It's misleading because you misunderstand what is "safe" at buffer > save time. No, it's misleading because Emacs didn't say that data were lost when visiting the file. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
