Re: utf-8 cut/paste

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>
> Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 11:41:09 -0400
> 
> > * Eli Zaretskii <ryvm@tah.bet> [2004-05-25 14:36:07 +0200]:
> >
> > No, it doesn't.  My comment was a minor one, to help Sam avoid
> > possible confusion in the future.
> 
> I am sorry, you lost me long ago (when MULE was merged into Emacs).

I'm not sure what that comment was supposed to tell (I didn't design
MULE, nor integrated it into Emacs).  So I will just pretend it was
never written.

I simply tried to help you understand things better, assuming that you
wanted to understand; if not, feel free to disregard what's below.

> I understand what a CHARACTER is (a type in CL).
> E.g., #\C is a "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C", or
> #\\x7f is a "CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ES" (even through they might look
> similar in your font).
> I understand that there are many (partial) function between (subsets of)
> (INTEGER 0) and CHARACTER, called "encodings".
> I don't know what a "charset" is, but I would guess that it is a subset
> of CHARACTERs on which a particular encoding is defined.

That is true, but it has no direct relevance to what I was trying to
explain.

What I was trying to explain was that, taking Cyrillic characters as
an example, any single Cyrillic character can be encoded in several
different encodings.  Examples of such encodings include KOI8-R,
ISO-8859-5, and cp1251 (a.k.a. windows-1251).

The set of Cyrillic characters is what MULE calls ``a charset''.  Any
encoding of characters from that charset is what MULE calls ``a coding
system''.

cp1251 is an encoding, not a charset.  It encodes the Cyrillic charset
(MULE calls that charset cyrillic-iso8859-5).  Similarly, cp1252
encodes the latin-iso8859-1 charset, and cp1255 encodes the
hebrew-iso8859-8 charset.

I sincerely hope that helps to make things more clear.