>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic
<hniksic(a)srce.hr> writes:
Hrvoje> Now I will try to answer the points you make, but I admit
Hrvoje> that I no longer understand what point you are trying to
Hrvoje> make.
My basic point is that I think that making Emchars and Bufbytes into
real objects with a linker-enforced interface would make it
(eventually) easier and less buggy to work with Mule and other radical
extensions of the idea that character == byte (text properties?).
[...]
Hrvoje> As I said above, I think it should be feasible to keep the
Hrvoje> current coding conventions, and change the underlying
Hrvoje> implementation.
True, of course. But each time this is done it's a big, ad hoc
project. It's not obvious to me what the right Mule implementation
will be (I have my preferences of course). There are a number of
plausible candidates (current "Mule 2.3", the FSF's "Mule 3.0",
the
"UTF-2000 Mule" some guys are playing with at ETL, a Unicode or
UCS-4-based Mule, etc), and some people won't want Mule at all.
In the end you're right that defining an interface that would make
experimenting with various implementations systematic does not require
dynamically loadable modules. I think a DLL implementation would
enforce a very useful discipline on Mule, but self-discipline should
be just as effective.
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