From: Vincent Isambart Date: 2008-09-22T12:01:23+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:18779] Re: Character encodings - a less radical suggestion > I really think this a bigger minus than this implies. I can name a lot of > libraries that just flat out expect UTF-8 and choke and die on anything > else. Ruby 1.8 has trained us to think this way for many years. As we said before the main use of default_internal is for Unicode-inside applications so most of the time it would be UTF-8 anyway... > Now, if someone were to change Encoding.default_internal then all these > libraries will unexpectedly having data changed on them. I'm pretty sure > that would cause massive damage. This makes me think that there should be _at least_ a warning (or completely forbid) if some code tries to change default_internal and it was already set (if it's set to the same encoding, we could just ignore it).