Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What I'm telling you is that the standards are not authorities.
They obviously are authorities when they define the charsets Emacs wants to implement, at least. As far as I know, Unicode is the single authority on the world's character usage, as far as it goes. Why do you think it isn't (modulo bugs which I doubt it has now for the Latin scripts at issue but which you could just get fixed)? What else codifies this information? No one has presented any evidence that Unicode is wrong on what it says about usage and classification. It doesn't sound as though people arguing have even read it. > We do > not *have to* follow them. Arguments that presume that the standard > is an authority we must obey are simply invalid. The decision about > whether to follow any given standard on any given issue is a practical > decision. I've no idea why you think I'm not talking practicalities, on the basis of having implemented support for more locales than anyone else, I think. I said that if you follow Unicode and other relevant standards and usage guides, then you don't have to be, or have, an expert on every script. That's eminently practical. > Telling us that "Unicode says XYZ" is an argument in favor of doing > XYZ. It is not an open-and-shut decision. Unicode says how guillemets are used as a matter of fact, which you can verify. It's manifestly wrong for single ones to have word syntax and double ones to have paren syntax and I wish I'd just changed it when I had the chance. > A Unicode-based Emacs means an Emacs whose character codes are mostly > those of Unicode, The codes are actually mostly not unicodes (by a factor of 64/17). However they are a proper superset. That means you can deal sanely with the national charsets via their definitions in terms of unicodes from glibc and elsewhere. Otherwise you're pretty lost. > and which works more or less according to Unicode > specifications. It does not mean an Emacs that slavishly obeys > whatever Unicode says. We don't slavishly obey standards. I don't slavishly do things, and you're ignoring my implementation caveats (including backwards compatibility). I've looked at any information I could find which seemed relevant, and searched quite hard for some. I'm talking after a considerable amount of work which was meant to help. It's a pity it obviously doesn't help and someone else will have to repeat it eventually or that Emacs will be backwards compared with the character handling in most of the rest of GNU. _______________________________________________ Emacs-pretest-bug mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
