Re: Language environments

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Paul Eggert wrote:

> >From Emacs's point of view I suggest handling all four ISO 639
> abbreviations (Serbo-Croatian (sh), Serbian (sr), Croatian (hr), and
> Bosnian (bs)) with a single Emacs language environment that supports
> both Cyrillic and Latinic well.

How can you have an Emacs language environment that supports both
Cyrillic and Latin scripts?  I think you can't.

The problem is that ISO-8859 charsets use conflicting 8-bit codepoints
if you mix more than one in the same document.  Emacs currently cannot
save such mixed buffers in anything but emacs-mule, which is useless
outside Emacs, or iso-2022, which is not very useful in Europe.

Decoding files is also a problem: without knowing in advance whether
to favor Latin or Cyrillic, Emacs will err with a high probability.
Users must put "coding:" tags into their files to make this workable.

Changes to stock Emacs code or add-on packages can give you a unified
or Unicode environment where you can use UTF-8 files, which don't have
those problems, but that's not yet part of the official distribution.

Am I missing something?