Re: National Language Support Functions

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 01:11:01 +0100
>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
>> CC:  jasonr@gnu.org
>>     
>
> Could people who have access to MS-Windows please try these two
> programs and report the results?  It is important to describe the full
> details about your regional and international settings (found in
> Control Panel) on each machine where you test this.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>   
This is on the UK English version of Windows XP

LangID = SYS: 0x809, USR: 0x809        [en_GB]
LCID = SYS: 0x809, USR: 0x809          [en_GB]
GetUserDefaultUILanguage() = 0409      [en]
GetSystemDefaultUILanguage = 0409     [en]

Regional Options:

Standards and formats: English (United Kingdom)
Location: United Kingdom

Advanced:
Language for non-Unicode programs: English (United Kingdom)



As far as I can tell from documentation, GetSystemDefaultUILanguage() 
and GetUserDefaultUILanguage() return a constant value that the user has 
no control over on all versions of Windows ME and XP Home, and most 
versions of Windows 2000, XP Professional and Server 2003. The exception 
to this is certain large corporate customers who get a special version 
of Windows so they can deploy a single OS image across all their 
machines regardless of language. For those cases, 
GetSystemDefaultUILanguage() should always return 0409 (english), as 
these images are based on the English version of Windows. 
GetUserDefaultUILanguage() result can be changed by the user at login, 
or by the administrators in policy files.

Since the first set of values can be changed by the user on all versions 
of windows, I think it is more appropriate to use these in Emacs. They 
also seem to be more precise, offering the sub-language as well as the 
main language.

The fact that these can get out of step, as Lennart has managed to do on 
his machine, seems to be a bug in Windows, and I think it is an edge 
case we shouldn't worry about. Some of Lennart's settings state that 
Swedish should be used on his computer, so he should not be surprised 
when programs such as Emacs take notice of that.