Some thoughts on Unicode.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe <kehoea at parhasard.net> writes:

    Aidan> If you're writing lisp code that works on current XEmacs,
    Aidan> you don't see an error when data loss occurs.

Sure, that's what latin-unity is for.  But we're talking futures.

    Aidan> this 21.5.17 dropped characters for me when I was accessing
    Aidan> it via Apple's Terminal.

OK, I remember that bug.  There's a patch in process for lstreams
(internal I/O handling) that might fix this.

    Aidan> _If_ encode-coding-region signalled error when it saw
    Aidan> something it couldn't encode, then sure, the approach you
    Aidan> describe would absolutely make sense. It doesn't at the
    Aidan> moment, and I don't see any projections for when it will.

It's trivial to make it do so, and it's very high on my list because
Hrvoje Nikšić has been asking for it forever (more precisely, he has
been asking for XEmacs to not silently destroy data/convert to ISO
2022, and this is an important step in that direction).  I won't
recommend that individual change for 21.4, because I don't know what
else it might screw up.

    Aidan> Though I don't imagine there will be much metadata you can
    Aidan> trust to differentiate between French and German

If you don't have metadata, you don't do it.  But I'm thinking about
people working with (say) XML DTDs designed for translation, and we
can provide AUCTeX/x-symbol/preview-latex-like WYSIACATWYGTS (What You
See Is A Closer Approximation To What You Get Than Source) facilities,
MIME mail, etc.

    Aidan> And heuristic algorithms going wrong are very, very sucky.

A very succinct description of practically everything that's wrong
with Mule.  :-)


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