Re: windows-1251 language environment

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <87ekx0dne0.fsf@emacswiki.org>, Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org> writes:

> Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:
>>  The trouble with `language' environments is that they have little to
>>  do with the language per se.  If you're not going by system defaults
>>  (locales), I think you want to provide orthogonal customization of
>>  language, codeset, and other features.  If you lump them all together,
>>  you'll have probably four for each Western European language: latin-1,
>>  latin-9, windows-1252 and utf-8.  Then multiply by two or three for
>>  the possible input methods.  Then the calendar is different in
>>  territories with the same language...

> I agree with Dave Love.  Take Switzerland as an example, and let us
> only talk about German and French, excluding Italian and
> Rhaeto-Romance.  We speak German, but we use a different ispell
> dictionary because instead of a sharp s we use double-s, and we use
> our own keyboard layout.  We use any of the four coding systems Dave
> lists.  We use a different date format (last time I checked).  The
> French speaking Swiss use the French ispell dictionary, but they, too,
> have a different keyboard layout.

> The language per se is not enough information.

That's why I didn't simply use the term "language" but used
"language environment".  I agree that it's ridiculous to
provide all possible combinations in advance.  But, I think
there should be a way to name a set of various orthogonal
customizations so that a user can easily switch from one set
to another by specifying a name.  I think we should treat a
"language environment" as something like a `theme' which is
a collection of customizations of faces.

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