>>>   Because it is Unicode, a mechanism out of scope of Unicode has to
>>> supply language information to do sensible stuff.
>> What is the sensible stuff it needs to do?
> 
>   To display strings in an ok way.
> 
> http://www.unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#2
> 
> says that you should select a proper font based on the language you
> would like to treat the character in.

Ok. However, this still doesn't answer the questions:
a) why do I have to configure my image myself to set the language?
   (couldn't Squeak find out on its own what language was configured
   in the host system?), and
b) as I need to select the fonts to render the text *anyway* (through
   the appearance... menu), what is the purpose of the language
   environment then?

>   Although the current Squeak implementation is not there yet, you
> would like to do different sorting or uppercase/lowercase conversions
> based on the language (even within Latin-1 regions).  A segment of
> text generally should have more information other than the bare code
> point of Unicode.

That's an entirely different issue, and completely unrelated to the
changes discussed. I understand the concept of a locale. Whether
collation should take the locale into account is independent on
whether I can enter arbitrary characters through the keyboard,
or open files with arbitrary names.

Regards,
Martin