Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Richard Stallman]

    I agree.  Text strings exposed to Lisp programs should be in the
    internal representation, i.e. decoded.  Otherwise, Lisp programs would
    be unable to easily use them in text-processing context.

This would be true ordinarily, but here there is a more important
factor.  The usual thing to do with environment variables is to pass
them through.  Making sure that is solidly reliable is the highest
priority for environment variables.  Therefore we have to leave these
strings in their original format.