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

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> If the input method is called "latin-1-prefix" (-postfix, -alt), then the
> user would expect it not to produce characters outside the latin-1 
> range. But for input methods called "french-prefix" etc, I think they would
> expect to be able to type all letters and symbols in common usage in French,
> which these days includes the euro symbol. European users have surely
> encountered the fact that the euro is not covered by the latin-1 character
> set by now, so if they want to save in latin-1 
> encoding, they will simply avoid it. The "latin-*" input methods already
> contain the euro, so there is precedent for including it.

Most of the latin-N input methods made a lot of sense in Emacs-22 where
the chars were not unified.  Now that they're unified, the distinction
is not nearly as important, so I'm in favor of merging/removing most of
those methods, keeping just some generic "latin" input method maybe,
plus the language-specific ones of course.

The impact it may have on the encoding used when saving the file is best
tackled elsewhere.  E.g. if the user's preferred coding systems
indicate that latin-1 is preferred over latin-9, then saving a file as
latin-9 in the absence of any coding cookie should prompt the user,
explaining that Emacs will mis-detect it as latin-1 next time around.


        Stefan