Re: Setting file-name/process coding system from LANG

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     BTW, another possibly related issue is that if I start `emacs -q' with
>     LANG=ja_JP, then the language-environment is automatically set to
>     "Japanese" -- great!  But if I start `emacs -q' with LANG=ja_JP.utf8, then
>     the language environment is set to "utf-8", and that doesn't make much
>     sense to me -- indeed the whole concept of a "utf-8 language environment"
>     seems kind of weird.  In this case I think it should instead (1) set the
>     language-environt to "Japanese", and then (2) set the various I/O 
> encodings
>     to be `utf-8'.

> Handa, what do you think?

A while ago, I proposed an idea about make language
environment more hierarchical and make it possible to
generate one on demand from locale, but you refused such a
change.

In the above case, we should have a language environment
Japanese-UTF-8.  But, preparing all such lang. envs. in
advance is a waste of memory (we surely need many XXX-UTF-8
lang. envs.).  So, my idea was to generate that lang env by
inheriting Japanese lang. env. and overriding several
settings (values for keys coding-system, coding-priority,
nonascii-translation of language-info-alist) for UTF-8 when
Emacs runs on ja_JP.utf8 locale and Japanese-UTF-8 doesn't
exist.

Then a user can customize (and store in .emacs) that
lang. env. if he wish.

Of course, such a change requires carefull reconstructure of
language-info-alist, and thus we may have to postpone it
until 21.4 release.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
address@hidden