Re: "Coding system"? Eh?

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:
> 
> > I believe Michael's point was that, under Mule, you can create
> > coding systems that have nothing to do with character sets, such
> > as a `gzip' coding-system.
> 
> They do that?  And if the unzipped file results in something that's
> iso-2022-jp, do they run it though the decoding twice, or do they
> have a gzip-iso-2022-jp coding system, as Morioka almost suggested
> for base64?  (base64-iso-2022-jp, etc.)  The latter would be a
> nightmare, and the former would be just yucky.

I believe XEmacs/Mule allows you to create coding-system chains (at
least I seem to recall seing internal code to that effect), the yucky
solution, whereas in FSF Emacs you get the nightmare one.

> > Coding systems are Emacs-specific hybrids between character sets
> > and their external representation.  This probably makes them
> > different enough from "character sets" to warrant for a separate
> > name.
> 
> Hm.  I did a `M-x list-coding-systems', and it listed nothing but
> character sets.

Well, I never said all of this was implemented.  :-)  I was trying to
explain the concept, the way I see it.

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.