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
Peter Dyballa 
<Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>], who wrote in article <mailman.11617.1210850110.18990.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>:
> 
> Am 15.05.2008 um 02:37 schrieb Ilya Zakharevich:
> 
> > I spent (again!) a lot of time trying to teach Emacs to show 8-bit  
> > data
> > (in a TTY).

> You should use a font in this terminal emulation (or real hardware?)  
> that has these glyphs

TTY works fine.  Thanks.

> and it's best you have in the shell's  
> environment LANG or better LC_CTYPE set to a value that arranges all  
> you need. From LC_CTYPE GNU Emacs derives its "language-environment"  
> automatically.

Impossible.  locale() does not support the environment of the TTY
(even if I *know* what is this environment, and why should I?).

Yours,
Ilya

P.S.  Let me remind what is an 8-bit-safe program: I come to a TTY.
      The keyboard allows me to enter some characters (encoded as
      8-bit).  The screen is able to show glyphs for these characters.

      Given this, I can use

	    cat >> file

      to "edit" a file.  Note that I do not care in any way what is
      the encoding of these chars...  Emacs should be at least as
      "smart" as cat.

      How should one convince Emacs to be as smart as cat, and why
      this is not documented?