Re: PATCH to add euro symbol to French-{postfix, alt-postfix, prefix} input methods

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> In article <8563w6vipk.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>> In fact, I find it somewhat silly to have different latin-x input
>> methods at all.  Why don't we replace them all with a single latin
>> input method, or with language specific ones?  It seems somewhat
>> pointless to have input methods that meticulously avoid producing a
>> certain character when this character can be produced by any number
>> of other means.
>
> I can think of one reason to have them.  While one is using
> latin-x-* input methods, he can think that he never type a
> character not included in latin-x.  In other word, if he
> wants to type a character not supproted by latin-x-* input
> methods, he must expect that his file can't be saved by
> latin-x.

So he does when using cut&paste, or quite a few other means of producing
characters.  I really don't think that we are doing people much of a
favor of maintaining a lot of slightly different character-set specific
input methods.  It would make more sense to have some mechanism complain
upon any way of inserting non-encodable characters (using buffer
modification hooks, for example), and then have just one generic
well-maintained latin input method rather than a dozen "forks".  It
would also be possible to auto-prune input methods depending on the
desired target encoding (for example, use the TeX input encoding for
accented letters but tell it not to produce things outside of latin-9).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum