Re: Setting file-name/process coding system from LANG

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 10:13:53PM +0900, Kenichi Handa wrote:
> > When Emacs sees LANG=ja_JP.utf8, surely it can select the Japanese
> > language environment, then do something else to cause use of UTF8.
> > Surely it can do this without having an explicit language environment
> > for the combination of the two.
> 
> Then a user can't recover that original setting when he once
> switch to, e.g., Latin-1.  Just switching back to Japanese
> can't setup coding systems for utf8.

Why can't we do what I suggested earlier, and set `file-name-coding-system'
(and presumably some analogue for process I/O and terminal-coding-system)
instead of `default-file-name-coding-system' from the "utf8" portion of LANG?

Then `set-language-environment' could set `default-file-name-coding-system'
but it wouldn't actually have any effect -- which at least in this
circumstance seems correct.  Other language-environment settings (like the
tutorial language etc) would have the proper effect.

> Another problem is the case of LANG=zh_CN.utf8.  Currently
> we don't have Chinese lang. env.  We only have Chinese-GB,
> Chinese-EUC-TW, Chinese-BIG5, Chinese-CNS.  Which one to
> use?

Presumably whichever one best matches the "country" portion of LANG.

-Miles
-- 
.Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.