Re: compiling option for nomule

Uwe> My question is then, what is this feature good for, Uwe> especially if mule is off? It's called the "file coding" feature because it is a minimal abstraction of Mule coding systems. Ie, it looks at the stream of bytes as they go into the buffer, and does _nothing_. In fact, it doesn't do absolutely nothing. It checks for occurances of the characters or pairs CR, CRLF, and LF, and if one of them predominates (I think the criterion is all of the linebreaks in the first 3000 characters use that convention), then the file is judged to be a Mac, DOS/Windows, or Unix text file, respectively. There are also checks for things like excessively long lines and too many non-whitespace control characters, which will automatically kick the file into "binary" mode. If the file appears to use the Mac convention, then CR->LF conversion is done on input and LF->CR on output. If the file appears to use the Windows convention, then the conversions are CRLF<->LF. If the file appears to be from Unix, then no conversion is done, and the buffer representation is the same as the external file. Uwe> And what sort of harm can be done with the feature enabled? If the file contains the other sort of control characters, then data corruption can occur. Eg, if this file is detected as Windows This is a single line<LF>containing a control character.<CRLF> it will be represented in the buffer as This is a single line<LF>containing a control character.<LF> and converted to This is a single line<CRLF>containing a control character.<CRLF> on output. Unlike Mule, this kind of error is extremely rare because of the stringent requirement that only one of the various conventions occur in the first 3000 characters. Also, if you exchange files with someone who uses a different kind of system, you can get confused because XEmacs will always present you with something that looks like ordinary text, but your correspondent may use an editor that can't handle it. Some people prefer to edit DOS files with a "^M" indicator at the end of every line. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.