Re: Lstreams, coding and md5 (was: Re: [PATCH] menubar selection in mswindows)
>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic
<hniksic(a)srce.hr> writes:
> To put it another way, shouldn't there be a set of functions
> that given an OBJECT in one coding system return another OBJECT
> in a different coding system?
Hrvoje> It would be very wasteful, I think.
It's wasteful only if automatic and user recognition of coding systems
are nearly 100% accurate. Otherwise it would be really nice to be
able to reliably tell Mule to efficiently convert from one to another.
We should be careful about the semantics of "OBJECT in coding
system". If we got the correct input coding system, then changing the
output coding system of the current object is trivial. It's the same
as changing a face. (What this causes redisplay to do is non-trivial;
but resetting the specifier is an assignment: trivial.)
If we screwed up the input coding system then we need to invert the
input mapping and apply the new input mapping to the inverse image of
the current OBJECT, an order-n operation.