From: "Bartosz Dziewoński" <matma.rex@...>
Date: 2012-06-06T20:26:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Magic comments justification

The encoding has to be set *before the file is even parsed*. So
obviously you can't use a regular method call to do this; this
basically forces you to create new syntax for setting the encoding.
However, you also want to keep backwards compatibility when possible –
so you make that new syntax look like comments for older Ruby
versions. Bam, you've got a magic encoding comment.

-- Matma Rex