Re: utf-8 cut/paste

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Date: 26 May 2004 16:02:59 -0400
> 
> > If we did that, it would make the unfortunate situation, whereby there
> > are multiple charsets that cover the same characters, even worse.
> 
> Isn't it exactly what happened with 8859-15 ?
> I never claimed it was desirable.

It was extremely unfortunate, but given that 8859-15 introduced a new
character that everybody and their dog wanted to be able to use, there
was really no other choice, as Unicode support was not ready yet to
become a viable alternative.

With the cpNNN issue, we _could_ afford losing some MS-specific
characters that were not supported by the then existing charsets.
(With a better Unicode supporte we have now, code-pages fixes even
that problem by mapping cpNNN directly into Unicode.)

> > Repeat after me: "multiple character sets covering the same characters
> > are BAD."
> 
> You're just saying that unicode is good.

Sure, but when cpNNN was introduced (Emacs 20.2, I think), Unicode
support in Emacs was almost non-existent.  The issue that was before
me was whether to introduce additional charsets covering characters
that already existed, and I felt strongly that we shouldn't do that
without a VERY good reason.