Unicodification of sources, part 1

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an chéad lá is fiche de mí Meitheamh, scríobh Sebastian Freundt: 

 > >> (From the SXEmacs Unix-only perspective, one alternative _might_ be to
 > >> find an ISO-2022 compatible coding system supported by GNU iconv that
 > >> does what my recent changes to the escape-quoted coding system does
 > >> [...]
 > >
 > > I don't understand why we need to worry about SXEmacs.

I brought it up because it would be rude and unhelpful to introduce an
incompatibility with SXEmacs in the packages (which we share) without at
least making them aware of the process.

 > > Let the SXEmacs developers worry about it, if they feel the need. We've
 > > got our hands full with our own project. (Don't interpret this as
 > > antipathy for SXEmacs; I wish the SXEmacs developers well. I'm just
 > > being pragmatic.)
 > 
 > Absolutely right, Jerry. :)
 > 
 > And thanks to Aidan for this wonderful proposal. We are currently
 > checking/discussing the pros and cons of libiconv and friends, from what I
 > understood so far it is a very promising approach.

I’m sceptical that you can use much of it without ripping out most of the
existing Mule infrastructure. If it were possible to modify their ISO-2022
code to use UTF-8 escapes for unknown Unicode code points, then, combined
with just-in-time Unicode assignment in the editor, you could use most of
the existing code, without needing to develop totally new redisplay or
language tagging facilities. 

 > However, our decision for or against one of the alternatives is not
 > something you should bother with or count on, especially as we do not
 > have:
 > 
 > 1. enough insight to foresee consequences
 > 2. enough man-power and competence to migrate faster than you
 > 3. very limited interest in unicode at all (from the developers point)
 > 
 > We would like to see us in an reactive role, that is our final decision
 > may depend on yours, but conversely you should not necessarily consider us
 > in your decision.

Okay, thank you for the input!

 > If all your changes are transparent enough at lisp level, we will surely
 > implement the necessary compatibility layer at the C level.


-- 
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!