Re: iso-8859-1 and non-latin-1 chars

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <rzqbs3h63i5.fsf@albion.dl.ac.uk>, Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:
> Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:
>>  Yes, it's better for Emacs, but not for the other programs
>>  (e.g. ispell).  And such Emacs Lisp applications that use
>>  wrong coding system should be fixed anyway.

> Yes, my point is that ispell should be fixed, but people are avoiding
> the issue.

I don't think the program `ispell' itself should be fixed.
When it requires a latin-1 input, sending an ESC sequence is
not good.  We can't blame ispell for not interpreting that
ESC sequence properly.

But, ispell.el should be made more robust.  When it finds an
unencodable character in a word, perhaps, it should show the
word as a misspelled word to a user instead of sending it to
the ispell program.

> Other programs allow users to set a coding system for some
> file and they sometimes set it wrongly; I think I mentioned BBDB
> initially as a real example.

Then BBDB should call select-safe-coding-system before
siliently using a specified coding system.

>>  > What concept do you mean, exactly?
>>  
>>  For instance, the MIME charset iso-8859-1 can encode Latin-1
>>  chars only, and it's stateless, no escape sequences.

> But the issue is what happens when you tell them to encode something
> they can't (safely) encode.  They either have to produce some
> more-or-less arbitrary result or to arrange to signal an error.

Yes, or course.  But, I think producing "?" is less
surprising than produing an ESC sequence.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@m17n.org