Re: More charset things

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:

> The MULE development group is nearly entirely Japanese; including
> the people implementing Devanagari (for sure) and Arabic and
> Ethiopic (IIRC).  Not surprisingly, the tuning (and tuning is
> absolutely necessary; the linguists don't know enough about language
> for charset guessing and the like to be more than heuristic) is best
> for Japanese, and bugs for non-Japanese languages don't get found
> and fixed quickly.

They don't get fixed at all, Stephen.  I don't like to bitch all that
much about the subject, since I could come out with the patches as
well as anybody else (but my disgust at the code is another matter),
only I *have* to correct you when you say that bugs don't get fixed
"quickly".

I have reported a number of latin2-related bugs in XEmacs/Mule, and I
haven't seen a fix for any of them.  I, a latin2 user, am supposed to
be a target audience for Mule, and yet I cannot bring myself to use it
for longer than ten minutes.

If Mule is usable for anyone except the latin1 people and the Japanese
(== majority), I'm happy for them.  But it's not my cup of coffee.
Not yet.

> But MULE is the only truly multilingual platform there is at the
> moment, to the best of my knowledge; Unicode doesn't satisfy the
> needs of lots of people, and is not easily extensible without
> changing the standard.  MULE is.  MULE is more than a Japanese
> version of Emacs.

:-(

>     Lars> A partial implementation of utf-mumble was posted recently
>     Lars> somewhere by someone.  (Could I possible get any more
>     Lars> vague?)  So I'm Cc'ing this to the xemacs-mule list.
> 
> Morioka-san ported (IIRC) a Lisp-level implementation of UTF-8.

Can such a thing even work under XEmacs/Mule?  The design differences
sound as if they make such a thing impossible.