[PATCH] Binary encoding

*N.B. Don't commit this please! It's still preliminary.* Here's a copy of my encode-binary-* functions, for anyone interested. The original reason for creating these was that I wanted to remove the hackery from select-x.c, but they'll probably prove more generally useful. I'm currently working on the decode-binary-* functions, so *don't* send me e-mail complaining that they don't work - I *know* that, because I haven't implemented them yet. I'm particularly interested in whether or not people on strange platforms (with odd numbers of bits per character, characters per int, etc...), or people using fancy coding systems (e.g. chinese, japanese etc...) have any problems. The encode-binary-string/encode-binary-stream functions should be capable of encoding *any* data structure used by *any* other programming language on any system you can think of, as long as it doesn't involve pointers (I'm still thinking about how to support these without allowing lisp code to crash XEmacs - I have some ideas, but I will leave these until I've finished the decode functions and added delayed selection support to the mswindows code [and written docs for all of these modifications]). Kind regards, Alastair. p.s. No ChangeLog entry yet. I'll do this when I've finished the decode-binary-* functions. I'm just after preliminary feedback at the moment. ____________________________________________________________ Alastair Houghton ajhoughton(a)lineone.net