Re: "Coding system"? Eh?

[Michael Welsh Duggan <md5i@cs.cmu.edu>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no> writes:

> Isn't what MULE calls a "coding system" what the entire rest of the
> world call a "character set"?  So `decode-coding-system' should
> really have been called `decode-charset'?

No, not really.  A character set is merely a set of characters.
latin-1, etc, are often called character sets because they use the
same number of characters as extended ASCII, etc.  A coding-system is
just that: a coding-system.  The characters could be encoded any which
way (including encrypted!).  For example, old-jis uses escapes around
sequences of 7-bit characters.  This is an encoding, which you can
display using a character set, but not a character set in and of
itself.

More information on {decode,encode}-coding-system: The way the
function is handled internally is that it deletes the region and
replaces it with the {de,en}coded text.  This means markers in the
region are screwed.  Regions are still buggy though; they shouldn't
work the way they do currently.  I am looking into how hard it would
be to fix things such that markers at least can be preserved.

-- 
Michael Duggan
(md5i@cs.cmu.edu)
.