On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, Mats Bengtsson wrote:
What you have found in the source code files are some left-overs
from version 2.4 and earlier, where LilyPond only knew about Latin1.
If you browse through the mailing list archives, you can also find
out why this was not a satisfactory solution if you want to promote
the program outside western Europe.
(1) That's certainly one huge mass of "left-overs". For a language
that allows coloured labelled noteheads, Gregorian notation, tenor
clef, and Lord knows what else, it is amazing that the developers
would choose to *remove* an existing capability.
(2) Deleting a capability is not "promotion". Making unicode an available
*option* would be promotion, but deleting the existing ability to use
Latin-1 is not going to help you recruit users amongst the half billion
people in Western Europe and North America whose other software all
understands Latin-1. (As a side remark, when I communicate with people in
Romania or other Eastern European locations, I have to use Latin-2;
software [mainly dictionaries] downloadable from those locations uses
Latin-2, *not* unicode. Unicode may or may not become predominant
someday, but it certainly is not now.)