Re: What exactly is chinese-big5?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:37:03 +0100
> From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> CC: Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > In Emacs 22, cp936 could be a good approximation to GBK, right?
> >   
> 
> Does Emacs 22 have an independant implementation of cp936, or is it just 
> an alias for gb2312?

You are right, it's an alias of gb2312.  And in Emacs 23, it's an
alias of gbk.

> I defined some aliases like this (against protests from Dave Love), so 
> that we could initialise the locale-coding-system on Windows based on 
> the system codepage, without needing a mapping alist to select the 
> closest approximation when Emacs did not have full support for the 
> codepage. Dave's protest was that it would cause confusion to claim 
> support for codepages where that support was incomplete, while my point 
> of view was that limited support is better than none at all.

I have no objections to these aliases, especially since the confusion
is there anyway, given the lack of documentation for the precise
ranges of codepoints supported by big5 and others, as mentioned in
this thread by Handa-san.