Re: display table for eight-bit-graphic

[kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann)]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> In article <rzqbs263bxm.fsf@albion.dl.ac.uk>, Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> I just got reminded about this.  I think the standard display table
>> should display eight-bit-graphic characters as octal in multibyte
>> mode.  Displaying them as graphics can be misleading.
>
> I agree, and I vaguely remember that we discussed it looong
> ago, and people agreed on displaying them as octal.

I thought it was discussed and it was agreed to display them as
graphic?  But I agree that it is misleading.

I think the idea was that people who use eight-bit locales expect
things to be displayed using that charset -- so if a random byte
comes along, and it happens to match the code for ä in that locale,
then display that byte as ä.  Regardless of whether the random byte
is really known to be in iso-8859-1 encoding.  So Emacs would match
the behavior of /bin/cat in this respect.

Hm.  I think that Erik Naggum has argued in this direction before.
His stuff is sometimes difficult to read (because you have to ignore
the rant) but I guess his arguments are more coherent and
comprehensible than mine.
-- 
Ambibibentists unite!