Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Richard Stallman]

    (It seems to me that the basic problem is that the environment string
    is exposed to Lisp, presumably because it predates multilingual
    issues, and really shouldn't be.  I think accessing it directly should
    be deprecated.)

The general idea of Emacs is to expose data structure to the Lisp
program whenever possible.  I see no reason to go against that here.