Re: per-buffer language environments

[Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>]

>   . There's any number of possible use-cases for needing this kind
>     of feature.  They are all quite rare (if they weren't, we would
>     have many complaints about not having such a feature, which we
>     don't).

I would rather say that these use-cases are all quite new.
Previously, Emacs didn't do too well with Unicode, and only recently
free CJK fonts (especially for Japanese) are available as TrueType
fonts so that the user has a choice to select between well-crafted
fonts.

>     The current heuristics encoded in the global language environment
>     does not cover well rare and marginal use-cases, being just that
>     -- a set of heuristics.  It is therefore quite probable that just
>     making the language environment buffer-local and keeping all the
>     rest of its machinery and semantics would do the wrong thing for a
>     large portion of the use-cases which need such a buffer-local
>     feature.

I don't think so, however, people on this list should submit more
use-cases if possible so that we can decide this issue easier.

>     Setting the language can surely identify a small set of
>     appropriate encodings, but I very much doubt that it can
>     correctly select The Right One.

Note that I'm specifically talking about Unicode.  IMHO, handling of
all other encodings should stay as-is since they will be extinct soon
anyway.


    Werner