Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:

>   To ensure the compatibility, we need to have a flag to switch the
> VM's behavior, I would imagine...

Yoshiki and I actually discussed that a while ago when I started getting 
into the m17n stuff. What I suggested was to introduce primitives, that 
return encoding and localization information to the image.
In Windows you can switch the locale for every programm, even while it 
is running, so Squeak needs to have a way to retrieve information about 
what its environment currently is.
This would also allow us to switch Squeak to currently set locale, 
instead of having to do that within the image, which we still could 
allow on top of the default behavio(u)r.

Just MTC

Michael