Re: Language environments

[Kenichi Handa]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Richard Stallman wrote:

>>  Should we make a systematic effort to add language environments for
>>  lots of languages?

> Maybe.  Currently, by far the only difference between the various Latin-1 
> language environments is the default input method.  Isn't this a waste?
> (And what if someone wants a French language environment but with Latin-9 
> charset as the default?)

Latin-X and Latin-Y are different not only in input method
but in charsets and coding-systems, but, yes, "German",
"Slovenian", etc. are different only in input method,
sample-text, and tutorial files from the corresponding
latin-X language environment.

We may have to have more tree structures something like
below:

European
  Latin-1
    Generic
    French
    German
    ...
  Latin-9
    Generic
    French
    German
    ...
  ...

And, making leaves inherit parents' information.

Another idea is to have this kind of structure:

European
  Generic
    Latin-1
    ...
  French
    Latin-1
    Latin-9
    ...
  German
    Latin-1
    ...
  ...

This structure roughly refrects the structure of locales
(e.g French->Latin-1 == "fr_FR.iso8859-1", French->Latin-9
== "fr_FR.iso8859-15").

> Personally, I was surprised that the menu-bar item for "Emacs Tutorial 
> (choose language)..." depended on the list of known language 
> environments (via read-language-name).  Isn't it better to just look at 
> etc/TUTORIAL.* and work from there?

A proper tutorial file is automatically selected in each
language environment.  Currently the information to map a
language name to a tutorial file name is stored in
language-info-alist, but we don't have the reverse map.  So,
currently the only way to make C-u C-h t work is to make it
check language-info-alist which is what read-language-name
does.

To work form "etc/TUTORIAL.*", we need the above reverse map
in a different variable, which results in cluttering
information about languages.  I think it is better to keep
language-info-alist the only place to store information for
each language.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
address@hidden