Julian Bradfield writes: No reason at all. (Just how dumb do you think Ben Wing is, anyway!? Don't answer that, I know you know better.<wink>) First of all, here are the numbers from M-x show-memory-usage (I think you need to compile --with-debug to get that function in 21.5, and it may not be available in 21.4 at all): charset from-unicode to-unicode total total 528448 358440 886888 Yes, those numbers are *bytes*, not "words", "paragraphs", or TiB. (You're thinking of the Unihan.txt database, no doubt, which is indeed almost 30MB.) Second, look at how `load-unicode-tables' is implemented. You'll see that there is no reason why we can't load a minimal subset and add more on an as-needed basis. Since this is a once-per-session thing, who cares if it takes 25ms per table? There currently is no way to request on-demand loading, but I don't think that would be hard. "Catering to differences is not too annoying." Differences in basic Mule functions would be too annoying. No. For one thing, RMS considers following standards or established practice for the sake of conforming a form of subordination akin to slavery, and thus ethically unacceptable in the free software movement. However, and it's very important, the cores of most applications work fine in both forks. It's stuff like images that is quite different. Extents are a little bit annoying but there are several wrapper packages such as overlay.el in fsf-compat, as well as more specialized but accurate (within the field of interest) emulations in Gnus and VM (inter alia). Similarly ez-menu or whatever it's called. Heck, you know how Kyle feels about GNU and its assignment policy, but he's always maintained compatibility for VM, including use of the menubar (he'd basically retired by the time GNU got images and toolbars--- scary thought, isn't it). Several years ago I was going to write a wrapper package for images, too, implementing the GNUbie interface, but then I realized that practically speaking the dox would have to be licensed under the God-Forsaken Documentation License and I lost all appetite for the project. (I've grown up a little since then, but that stupid piece of free-advertising-grubbing hypocrisy *still* rubs me the wrong way.) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta