Re: Is it possible to use new Emacsen with non-ASCII?

[Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Eli Zaretskii 
<eliz@gnu.org>], who wrote in article <mailman.11643.1210878436.18990.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>:
> > > What is (terminal-coding-system) set to?
> > 
> > When?  After (set-language-environment "Cyrillic-KOI8")?  nil
> 
> Then set it to whatever your terminal supports (koi8-r, I presume, but
> that's a guess).  "M-x set-terminal-coding-system RET koi8-r RET".

And why set-language-environment did not do it?  

> Alternatively, try "(set-locale-environment koi8-r)", and see if that
> does what you want.  This will also set your keyboard encoding to
> koi8-r, and I'm not sure you want that.  (Maybe you should consider
> describing more about what you want: what files do you want to edit,
> how would you like your keyboard to be set, and what characters can
> your terminal display.  There are probably a couple of lines you need
> to add to your .emacs to get what you want, but it's hard to give
> advice without knowing the conditions.)

I did describe what I want (but maybe in a different place in the
thread): Be as smart as cat is.  Allow characters which are input from
keyboard (TTY), and allow them to be written a file.

> > > If your LANG or LC_ALL environment variables are set appropriately,
> > > Emacs should automatically use the correct terminal-coding-system,
> > > language-environment etc.
> > 
> > Irrelevant.  I can't set LANG.

> That's quite understandable, but set-locale-environment from within
> Emacs has the same effect on Emacs, and doesn't affect anything but
> Emacs.

I do not follow.  Do you say that set-locale-environment is going to
be useless anyway if the locale is not supported by the CRTL?  Then
what should I do?

[Suppose for a moment that I do not care which 8-bit chars are word
 chars, which are whitespace etc.  All I need Emacs is to read bytes
 from TTY, and write them down to a file.]

Thanks,
Ilya