macOS, and its offspring, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, use UTF-16LE for all internals, but readily import and export all versions of Unicode and a good many historic 8-bit and mixed-length codings.
In the new Swift programming language, which is white-hot in the Apple community, Apple is moving toward a model of a transparent, generic Unicode that can be “viewed” as UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32 if necessary, but in which a “character” contains however many code points it needs (“e” with a stacked macron, acute accent, and dieresis is algorithmically one “character” in Swift). Moreover, e-with-an-acute-accent and e followed by a combining acute accent, for example, compare as equal. At present, the underlying code is still UTF-16LE. -- SKen Software, LLC Coming soon to an iPhone near you > On Sep 15, 2016, at 9:19 AM, Philippe Verdy <verd...@wanadoo.fr> wrote: > > 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). >> >
