Re: utf-8 cut/paste

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin.Riefenstahl@epost.de>]

Hi Sam,


Note that your original problem with cyrillic is not actually related
to MULE.  MULE may make sound things a bit more complicated, but the
problem is that Emacs doesn't use the Unicode APIs of Windows.  Which
it can do fine (and probably will at some point), with or without
MULE.  At least on NT/W2K/XP, I don't know whether the Unicode
clipboard works on 9x/Me.


Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> writes:
> each character comes equipped with its integer encoding, and 2
> characters which are identical elements of CHARACTER, but appear in
> two different encodings (e.g., #\Ц encoded in koi8 and in alt) are
> different characters in MULE.  This is so absurd that I can hardly
> believe that anyone could ever conceive of this, let alone implement
> it.

You are presupposing that you know which "2 characters [...] are
identical elements of CHARACTER, but appear in two different
encodings."  While this knowledge seems obvious in theory, in practice
it involves quite a lot of work to formalize this unification for all
relevant charsets (i.e. for the charsets that are actually in use).

After the work has mostly been done in Unicode, this kind of
information is actually one of the major benefits of that standard.
So now, today we have a well-defined reference for things like:

> #\C is a "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C", or #\С is a "CYRILLIC CAPITAL
> LETTER ES" (even through they might look similar in your font).

But when MULE was first implemented, Unicode was in its infancy, if I
see this right.  So at that time this knowledge wasn't available in
formal terms and in the necessary breadth.  IOW, MULE (building on
ISO-2022) was a solution at the time, while Unicode was a still in the
design phase with much work to go.


benny