Re: display question: should ^N and \NNN widths be fixed?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On Fri, 24 May 2002, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:

> some of these (sub)tasks can (and probably should) be done concurrently.
> that's not noted here explicitly, but should be easy enough to figure
> out for anyone who wants to join in.

I have one (rather vague and potentially unhelpful ;-) comment: when you 
work on this, please keep in mind that some day Emacs will support 
bidirectional display (for languages that are written right to left), 
where advancing by screen position does not necessarily mean you advance 
by buffer position as well.  That is, if glyph G1 is displayed before 
glyph G2, it does not necessarily mean that the buffer position of the 
character displayed as G1 is before that of G2.

The current code in indent.c assumes that buffer positions increase 
monotonically with screen positions.  I'm not saying that you should do 
my job of lifting that limitation, but please keep this in mind when you 
design and code the new indent.c, so that changing it for bidi Emacs 
would not be harder than it is today.

> logistical questions: is it ok to make a branch in cvs?

I agree with Miles that it is best not to make a branch at all, but 
install your changes in parts, so that each part could be tested without 
breaking the main trunk.