Re: changing the values of iso-8859-* charsets

Ben> the only thing that's really "quite clear" is that you Ben> haven't bothered to actually read any of the code i've Ben> written. You're absolutely right: it was a _major_ bother to read it. In the future, check it in to CVS or I'm not going to read it. Ben> please go do that, then come back to me with *specific* Ben> issues referring to *actual* code, and i'll be glad to Ben> discuss them. Vcharset_japanese_shift_jis. Shift JIS is not a character set, and this object is only used in the corresponding coding system. It should not be visible from Lisp. I don't understand what the problem with not-a-character values for 256^N character sets is. There aren't any. I would say one way to deal with that problem (if it really is a problem in practice) is to pick an arbitrary code point that is unlikely to be a character or likely to be rarely used (such as ASCII SUB, 0x1A or ASCII NUL), and use that as the not-a-character value. If you encounter it, then look it up in the inverse table (ie, to Unicode). If the "Unicode" value is 0xFFFF, then it's not-a-character. There's a remark about needing an mcbs detector. That's not possible in the coding category framework AFAICS; mcbs as a category is indistinguishable from binary (although instances such as Shift JIS and KOI8 can be detected). Even when you go to the (statistical) classifier framework, it looks to me like you're going to need a different detector for _every_ mcbs coding system. Common operations like range checking could be factored out, but (for example) KOI8 and EUC-JP (with uniform ranges) will do it differently from Shift JIS and Big5 (which have ranges which vary according to whether they are single-byte, first-of-two, or second-of-two). So each mcbs will have to have some code to make its idiosyncratic checks. ISTR that there was a comment about KOI8 being assigned the ISO8 category although it's really mcbs; it might be better to make it binary. Hard to say. Shift JIS and Big5, OTOH, clearly should be conflated with binary IMO. Would it be hard to make a no-C0-controls category, which only allows the usual whitespace characters from the 0x00-0x1F,0x7F set? All of the mbcs encodings I know of would fit into that. Even EBCDIC almost does! Why use Dynarrs for the charset list? An mbcs needs two charsets, plus the minimum Dynarr overhead of 5 words. That's the space required by 7 charsets. Seems rather implausible that you'd need more than that. Wouldn't an application with 8 or more charsets be better served by coalescing the non-overlapping charsets in the list into a single charset? In configure.ac you should force Mule on if Unicode is requested, not force Unicode off if Mule is not present. (Barfing and saying "make up your mind" would also be reasonable, but I really think that people who want Unicode _really want Unicode_.) I don't understand the logic for nuking the columns and direction properties of charsets. That's just going to introduce GNU incompatibilities in table formatting and the like. Shouldn't the no-such-character value be (Ichar) 0xFFFF, rather than (Ichar) (-1)? I guess your tables are shorts, but still it's ugly, and in code where they're mixed with ints could cause trouble. char_table subtables need to become Lisp objects, or Marcus's new allocator will break. The stuff about ranges spanning charsets in regex.c pinned my bogometer. Ranges don't even make sense within charsets any more, because collating order varies with locale in POSIX, and different languages collate the same charsets in different ways. I agree that ranges are a very convenient UI, but we should deprecate them, document that they do not have a universal meaning, and document what the meaning is in XEmacs (probably To Be Announced, I think we should avoid committing). Is Ichar_charset_obsolete_me_baby_please gone yet? -- School of Systems and Information Engineering 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.