Re: Language environments (Re: How to insert cyrillic characters in utf-8 buffers?)

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> > It is not enough to say "Russian".  There are users who prefer KOI8-R 
> > with Russian, others who prefer ISO8859-5, etc.  So in Emacs we have 
> > already "Cyrillic-ISO", "Cyrillic-KOI8", and "Cyrillic-ALT".  A UTF 
> > ``language environment'' does fit this scheme to some extent.
> 
> Yes, but the name should be "Russian" and than the user should have the
> possibility to choose a list of the default coding system as an option.
> 
> Can I change the coding system for the language environment "German"?

You can do that by invoking the prefer-coding-system function after
setting the language environment.

> > In any case, we do need a name for such an environment, because the
> > language environment is the main machinery we have in Emacs for setting 
> > priorities and preferred encodings, without which things like guessing 
> > the text encoding and handling of unibyte text won't work correctly.
> 
> I'm not an expert in this area; I don't know how hard it is to guess
> UTF-8 encoded texts correctly

Emacs handles this by defining priorities between ``competing''
encodings.  The most preferable encoding wins.  That's what
prefer-coding-system does: it changes the priorities.