A better question is what is the default character encoding for the **installed** operating system.
Unfortunately it has no single response, because there are several default encodings for several parts of the OS. An OS has lots of components, many of them don't are transparent to the encoding it uses. All the 3 OSes you cite support several default character encodings, and in addition they support them in several encoding forms. All three support Unicode internally, but not in all software components. that will run with one or the other. And defaults will change according to your distribution or OS configuration options, and to your own current user settings 2016-09-15 13:14 GMT+02:00 Costello, Roger L. <coste...@mitre.org>: > Hi Folks, > > In a book that I am reading [1] the author mentions “the default character > encoding for the operating system.” What is the default character encoding > of: > > - Windows 10 > > - Mac OS > > - Linux > > > /Roger > > [1] *Practical Common Lisp* by Peter Seibel, p. 165 (footnote 2). >