Re: proposed Eistring interface

Ben> that way i'll have a reasonable chance of answering your ?'s Ben> before my hands fall off. Sorry, you've been right all along, and I'm wrong (surprise, surprise). I'm still glad I asked (I wouldn't have figured it out on my own for a long time), although I'm sorry about wasting your time with my misunderstanding. My excuse is that I've been living in buffer.h and mule-*.c for the last little while, which has given me a warped view of what "working with internally-formatted data" is about. I still have some comments and questions, hopefully they're more sensible now. (0) I suggest changing the description of the interface from "for working with internally-formatted data" to "for working with internally-formatted data in external contexts" or something like that, and emphasizing feature (e) "it provides easy operations to convert to/from externally-formatted data". This is redundant if you already know what the interface is for, but more specific for the completely-new-to-internals person. And it probably would have kept me from going off half-cocked. :-) (1) I still think it is harmless, at least for literals, and possibly useful to allow arbitrary bytes in ei{cat,cpy}_c(). (2) Is the usage (eiref (filename, 0) == '.') from mswindows_get_files() really correct? I've convinced myself that _this_ case works for all internal representations so far proposed, because they are all extensions of ASCII, and the comparison works after the char on the rhs is promoted to Emchar. But this really does need to be restricted to ASCII. C0 controls are OK. But Latin-1 would break for UTF-8 default internal, eg. Possibly an extension of the current APIs to include say eirefcmp_* (eistring, eiindex, character) is called for? But I can't think of an example offhand where the general case would be useful. (3) We may want to be a little bit careful with the notion of the default internal representation. I can see that a default internal representation of UCS-2 (UTF-16, I presume is what you really mean?) would be attractive. So what happens if you have data that is not representable in the default internal representation? Do we just tell those users to get lost? It would be kind of weird if the default internal representation that Eistrings dealt with was UCS-2 but UTF-8 representation was available in buffers, which you don't rule out. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."