Re: proposed Eistring interface

Ben> NOTE: One possible default internal representation that was Ben> compatible with UTF16 but allowed all possible chars in UCS4 Ben> would be to take an unused range of 2048 chars (not from the BMP space is too precious; I can't imagine that a block of 2000 characters will stay unstandardized forever. Or very long. Even currently: are you working from Unicode 3.0? I'm not following the new characters soap opera (except for Hiura's amusing anecdotes about the "Canadian minority"), but I vaguely recall reading that the BMP is basically full, there aren't any sensible places to put alphabets or syllabaries, let alone an ideograph set-sized block. Since this is an internal-only encoding, why not allow the range to be used to be user-selectable? Of course, we'd have to add a check for occurance of the range in external data sources. But you have to do that anyway, unless you put it in the private area, it's not a special loss to the user-configurable scheme. Ben> private area because Microsoft actually uses up most or all Ben> of it with EUDC chars). Oh, `echo "fsck -y /dev/Microsoft" >> /etc/init.d/rcS.d', and pray for some real fs errors. Maybe we can lose that whole partition. [Do you have an URL for the MS spec? This is too big to be ignored.] But I'm against the 2G surrogate proposal. People who want full MS compatibility will not truck with characters outside of the UTF-16 range, and those who want 2G characters will generally not care about MS compatibility. Those that want both should build a UCS-4 or UTF-8 XEmacs. This isn't really a big interoperability loss since the 2G character space will not contain any standard characters, so people using them are supposed to negotiate their use with other applications. Also, if we do go this way, we must be very careful to prevent _any_ leakage of internal 2G surrogates anywhere that a non-XEmacs app might look at them. -- 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."