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Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 22:15:35 -0800
Message-Id: <199612060615.WAA03500@xemacs.eng.sun.com>
From: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
To: Kenichi Handa <handa@etlken.etl.go.jp>
Cc: mule@etl.go.jp, mrt@mickey.ai.kyutech.ac.jp, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org,
        brewin@Eng.Sun.COM, Teruhiko.Kurosaka@Japan.Sun.COM
Subject: Re: mule API of Emacs and XEmacs (Re: caesar-region)
In-Reply-To: <199612060139.KAA06318@etlken.etl.go.jp>
References: <199612020640.WAA19812@xemacs.eng.sun.com>
	<199612060139.KAA06318@etlken.etl.go.jp>
Reply-To: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
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>>>>> "KH" == Kenichi Handa <handa@etlken.etl.go.jp> writes:

MB>    I'm not sure how useful coding-system-alist will be for process
MB>    operations.  Typically I would like interactive shells to be run with
MB>    coding-system-for-read and coding-system-for-write set to the
MB>    `natural' coding-system for that OS, but it's hard to come up with a
MB>    regexp that will match all possible names of shells.  I predict that
MB>    having shell mode use a particular coding system will be best solved
MB>    by using code run from shell-mode, e.g. in shell-mode-hook, as
MB>    implemented in XEmacs 20.0.

KH> How about registering `shell-file-name' in coding-system-alist?
KH> Anyway, that `natural' setting for OS usually doesn't consider
KH> multilingual environment, just a localization.  I hate it.  I
KH> don't want to see the output of `date' in Japanese, but I do want

Most Japanese WILL want to see the output of `date' in Japanese.
The dominant model for internationalization is the locale model.  We
cannot just ignore it.  Vendor-provided message translations are
desired by users, and are usually only provided using the locale model.

KH> to see Japanese/Chinese/Thai/... text if it is there when, for
KH> instance, I invoke `head FILENAME'.

Suppose different files are encoded using different coding systems.
In a shell buffer one types

$ date
Japanese date
$ xemacs
Segmentation fault - core dumped (in what language??)
$ head Thai-file
thai...
$ head Russian-file
ruskij...

how can Emacs interpret the output of the head commands so that it
knows to switch coding-systems?  No way - Emacs must be told when to
switch by the user.  But even then, how could

$ head Thai-file Japanese-file

ever work (unless using a multi-lingual coding-system such as iso2022)?

-- 
Martin Buchholz <mrb@eng.sun.com>
XEmacs Developer, Sun Microsystems Inc.

