Re: Emacs pound sign in non-windowed mode?

Roger Leigh <${rleigh}@invalid.whinlatter.ukfsn.org.invalid> writes:

> I gave XEmacs a try last week, and it screwed up my UTF-8 C
> source files.

Yes. XEmacs is just lossy for multilingual text, whatever the
propaganda says, and has precious little useful functionality that
isn't in Emacs.

> Once both GNU Emacs and XEmacs both use UCS as their internal
> character representation, things should become much easier all
> around.

The Emacs implementation actually uses a (large) superset of UCS.
However, the internal encoding isn't so important for correct
user-level behaviour as long as it can encode the required characters.
(I've worked on four different implementations.) Mostly things can be
made to work decently well with the emacs-mule encoding -- and you can
unify most input if you want -- but unfortunately some relevant work
has been waiting years actually to be released. (The major omission
in Emacs 21 is support for CJK unicodes; too many internal charsets
were already defined, unfortunately.) There are trades off in both
directions with UCS v. ISO-2022, e.g. significant inefficiency for
non-Latin text in the UCS version and relative difficulty choosing
fonts. Display is actually more of a problem than encoding.

> What's wrong with it? It's certainly not new--consider EUC (Extended
> UNIX Code) and ISO-2022.

Right. It's obviously necessary. (See also X's compound-text.)

> You might find switching to UTF-8 fixes quite a number of problems
> (after the initial teething problems),

Mileage obviously varies, but I've found utf-8 locales troublesome,
especially with heterogeneous multi-access systems.

> not least the ability to represent lots of useful characters like
> "þ" and "Þ", plus technical and drawing symbols.

Yes, that was a major motivation for multilingual work in Emacs 21,
and, interestingly, technical text has basically the same issues as
CJK and complex scripts. (Thorn is in Latin-1!)

Of course, if you live in Emacs, you can edit utf-8-encoded technical
text fine in any locale; the thing most likely to cause trouble is
sub-process i/o.

--
∀ p ∈ world • hello p □
.

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