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

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

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> Even if we write out a proper escape seqeucne for
> unencodable characters in a file, those people who are not
> familiar with handling coding systems can't read the file
> correctly.  If he reads it without C-x RET c, it will be
> read as iso-2022-7bit or something like that, not as
> iso-latin-1-with-esc.  If he doesn't notice it, he will be
> in a big confusion.  If he reads it with C-x RET c
> iso-latin-1, the escape sequence is not decoded, thus he
> will see raw ESC codes.

Sure, but the cases I'm particularly thinking of are actually
programs, not interactive use.  I think it's better to get escape
codes, which can be reconstructed, than to get `?', which can't.  I
realize this won't work generally, and will be different for Emacs 22.
In Emacs 22, it would be reasonable to do what yudit does (as far as I
remember) and write representations of the unicodes involved as \uxxxx
or similar.

> So, my conclusion was that writing out those escape
> sequences not only violates the commonly accepted concept
> about a coding system,

What concept do you mean, exactly?

> but also doesn't help people that much.