Christophe Rhodes writes:
Maybe -- but, unless I read Helmut's work wrongly, it's also the only way of communicating the full space of characters to Emacs -- that is, Helmut's message strongly implied to me that current released versions of the emacsen do not support utf-8 communications in any useful way. Is this correct?
I don't think so. I've used emacs 21.3.1 with clisp 2.33.2 communicating in utf-8 with no problem (with the characters I used). Of course, that was with ilisp...