Re: utf-8 cut/paste

[Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org>]

> * 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 understand what a CHARACTER is (a type in CL).
E.g., #\C is a "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C", or
#\С 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.

I seem to recall that MULE considers characters as elements of these
charsets, not as elements of the class CHARACTER, i.e., 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.

This reminds me of a story (<http://v2.anekdot.ru/an/an0303/o030321.html#10>):

The Soviet space capsule of the 60-ies, Soyuz, was supposed to have
been made from titanium, but the titanium turned out to be too hard to
process, so it was made of a heavier aluminum alloy.  This violated
the mass properties and thus aerodynamic stability of the craft.  There
was no time to re-design everything (Moon race!), so the stability was
restored by adding a 150 kilogram lead dead-weight to the construction.
(only Soyuz-TMA in the early 2000 got rid of this thing!)

I hope it will take Emacs less than 30 years to get rid of the MULE
dead-weight.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://www.podval.org/~sds) running w2k
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