Re: windows-1251 language environment

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> It sounds like you are saying that there's a more-or-less standard
> for GNU and Unix systems, but that Windows is different.  Is that
> right?

Actually, it looks as if I mis-interpreted eggert's comments in
mule-cmds.el.  They appear to say that the components of the name are
standardized, but the Single Unix Spec v3 (now equivalent to POSIX?)
actually says they are implementation-defined:

  If the locale value has the form:
                 
  language[_territory][.codeset]
  
     it refers to an implementation-provided locale, where settings of
     language, territory, and codeset are implementation-defined.
          
     LC_COLLATE , LC_CTYPE , LC_MESSAGES , LC_MONETARY , LC_NUMERIC , and
     LC_TIME are defined to accept an additional field @ modifier, which
     allows the user to select a specific instance of localization data
     within a single category (for example, for selecting the dictionary as
     opposed to the character ordering of data). The syntax for these
     environment variables is thus defined as:
            
  [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]

            
Of the systems I can check, current Solaris, Tru64 and Irix do use the
ISO language and territory codes.

> What I said is that Emacs
> should not *rely on* an external mechanism such as locales for
> customization.  It should provide an Emacs-natural customize mechanism
> *also*.

I don't think customization based on language, territory and codeset
is really unnatural.  (Which isn't to say that locales are perfect.)
The relevant parameters can already be set individually in Lisp,
obviously.