On 21 Nov 2004, Christophe Rhodes wrote:
Daniel Pittman daniel@rimspace.net writes:
On 20 Nov 2004, Christophe Rhodes wrote:
Helmut Eller e9626484@stud3.tuwien.ac.at writes:
CMUCL, OpenMCL: support only iso-8859-1-unix. SBCL, CLISP: can be used with iso-8859-1-unix or utf-8-unix. Allegro: supports all three.
Thank you. What Lisp support do you need to support other external formats? A lisp-side understanding of the emacs multibyte system?
If so, where is emacs-mule-unix documented?
`emacs-mule' is an internal coding system -- *not* something that you really want to use for communications between (X)Emacs and another process.
Maybe -- but, unless I read Helmut's work wrongly, it's also the only way of communicating the full space of characters to Emacs
I suspect this to be true, at least for XEmacs. I last used that four or five months ago, so my knowledge is less strong after that, but at the time, IIRC, a couple of encodings like Ethiopic and some of the forms of CKJ were not fully supported.
-- 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?
No. MULE-UCS, or Emacs 21.1, give you "good enough" UTF-8 support for most practical purposes. Obviously, since both are a mapping layer over the internal MULE encoding, that are not completely perfect.
I don't seriously expect anything to change here until the release of an internally Unicode Emacs, or XEmacs. At present, the GNU project seems to be closer, but both teams have working prototype code AFAIK.[1]
Regards, Daniel
Footnotes: [1] I don't follow internal XEmacs development any longer, since around four or five months ago, so things may have changed there.