Unicodification of sources, part 1

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an fichiú lá de mí Meitheamh, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: 

 >     Aidan> I think the best way to support Unicode on 21.4 and SXEmacs
 >     Aidan> would be to port over Ben’s 21.5 Unicode support,
 > 
 > I tend to disagree.  The 21.5 Unicode support is seriously twisted
 > around Windows support and the whole Mule infrastructure.  

What? No. Its Windows support has always been irrelevant to me as a Unix
user, it has never got in my way, and it’s much, much better, faster, and
saner code than is Mule-UCS or the GNU approach.

It’s oriented towards Mule, sure, but Mule is what we have. 

 > SXEmacs doesn't want any Windows baggage, and probably could benefit from
 > losing Mule, too. 90% of the Mule-related C code seems to be devoted to
 > variable-width character gymnastics.

Much like Perl, I imagine. That’s not a disadvantage in itself.

 > "Why should we impose on them a burden which we ourselves are unable to
 > carry?"
 > 
 > If SXEmacs wants Unicode, I think their best path is to rip out Mule
 > support and support Unicode directly with fixed-width buffers.  They
 > can use Ben's codecs,

Ben’s codecs aren’t finished. What Unicode-internal stuff I wrote tried to
use them, and ended up rewriting them. And that’s not finished either.

 > or even port Python's architecture. They'll be unable to compete in the
 > "stubborn Mule" market, sure,

They’ll be also unable to compete in the “supporting what existing
mulitlingual packages exist” market, since those packages are in the main
oriented towards Mule. That’s a bit of a minus.

 > but do they really want to when there's both GNU Emacs and XEmacs to
 > serve that niche? Only my two yen, of course; but if Steve et cie. are
 > interested in my opinion, that's it.

-- 
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!