Ar an cúigiú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Ben Wing: 
 > It's not _that_ widespread, since non-Mule XEmacs
wouldn't honour it, as I
 > understand it.
 
 btw "remove this assumption" means using calls to (make-char ...) instead of
 literal characters. 
Note that doing that to, say, the Quail input methods (which are, of course,
not in core) will make them much less maintainable. Not that they’re
especially maintained as is. 
 [...] so i've also created some unicode charsets for old-mule;
these cover
 everything up through 0x2FFFF and should take care of your problem to some
 extent. (i rearranged the handling of leading bytes so any private leading
 byte can be for charsets of any size, so less issues with running out of
 charset space.) if i assign appropriate ISO2022 final bytes, or implement
 the ISO2022 extension mechanism, these can be reliably stored in
 byte-compiled code. 
Thanks!
 (but this problem only arises if the source .el file is in utf-8,
*and*
 we use escape-quoted for the .elc file, *and* you have literal characters
 embedded in your .el file. are these all true?) 
Yes. (It’s an input method, it makes it a lot more maintainable when you can
see what a sequence of characters maps to.) 
Auto-save files use escape-quoted for much the same reason as does the byte
compiler--because it was a universal coding system for Mule--and will have
encountered the same problem.
Lisp hackers; how do I evaluate some code only at byte-compile time? The
below assertion fails both at compile time and run time. 
(eval-when-compile 
 (assert (not t) 
       t 
       "This file should not be compiled; 
The UTF-8 to escape-quoted mapping is not stable from one XEmacs invocation
to the next, in my JIT-UTF-8 implementation. Since byte-compiled files use
escape-quoted, this will break."))
 the use of the extension mechanism is more standard and less hackish
but
 with the former method, current 21.5 versions of xemacs can at least load
 the files without puking, since they create unknown iso charsets on the
 fly. probably we don't really care about such compatibility in any case. 
-- 
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sympathy, and respect, seeing in the millions of Russian youngsters who laid
down their lives in that war a tragedy rising above all the political
emotions of that time [...]” -- George Kennan on Vienna's „Erbsenkönig“