Re: Displaying bytes (was: Inadequate documentation of silly characters on screen.)

[Richard Stallman]

    $ od -c euro.txt
    0000000   T   h   a   t       c   o   s   t   s     200   1   7   .  \n
    0000020
    $ emacs euro.txt

    This is really a windows-1252 file and the strange character is
    supposed to be a Euro sign.
    For me, with no particular setup to make Emacs expect windows-1252
    files that shows in emacs as
    "That costs \20017." with raw-text-unix.

Why doesn't Emacs guess right, in this case?  Could we make it guess
right by changing the coding system priorities?  If so, should we
change the default priorities?

It may be that a different set of priorities would cause similar
problems in some other cases and the current defaults are the best.
But if we have not looked at the question in several years, it would
be worth studying it now.

    In that case revert-buffer-with-coding-system. Ideally I'd like Emacs
    to ask directly when opening the file
    in such a case, if it can't determine anything better than raw-bytes.

Maybe so.