Re: M17N

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

My comments here are tentative; there's a lot here I haven't thought
through yet.


> I tried Guile 1.3 and found that multi-byte strings had been
> removed.  How does Guile plan for the internationalization or
> multilingualization now?
> 
> I prefer the Emacs-style multi-byte strings.  Does anyone plan
> for that?

I don't know; it's a big mess.  I removed the old multi-byte support
because it seemed to me to be a bad approach to the problem.

I dislike the way Emacs handles multi-byte strings, because it seems
to me that it requires every piece of code which wants to manipulate
strings to understand N different character sets.  Any approach to
multi-lingual support should use a single, canonical encoding
throughout the system.

My favorite candidate for that single, canonical encoding is UTF-8,
and Unicode.  I realize Unicode is unpopular in Japan, but I've never
been given any convincing explanation for this.