10.11 Modules for Internationalization

mule-canna.c
mule-ccl.c
mule-charset.c
mule-charset.h
file-coding.c
file-coding.h
mule-mcpath.c
mule-mcpath.h
mule-wnnfns.c
mule.c

These files implement the MULE (Asian-language) support. Note that MULE actually provides a general interface for all sorts of languages, not just Asian languages (although they are generally the most complicated to support). This code is still in beta.

mule-charset.* and file-coding.* provide the heart of the SXEmacs MULE support. mule-charset.* implements the charset Lisp object type, which encapsulates a character set (an ordered one- or two-dimensional set of characters, such as US ASCII or JISX0208 Japanese Kanji).

file-coding.* implements the coding-system Lisp object type, which encapsulates a method of converting between different encodings. An encoding is a representation of a stream of characters, possibly from multiple character sets, using a stream of bytes or words, and defines (e.g.) which escape sequences are used to specify particular character sets, how the indices for a character are converted into bytes (sometimes this involves setting the high bit; sometimes complicated rearranging of the values takes place, as in the Shift-JIS encoding), etc.

mule-ccl.c provides the CCL (Code Conversion Language) interpreter. CCL is similar in spirit to Lisp byte code and is used to implement converters for custom encodings.

mule-canna.c and mule-wnnfns.c implement interfaces to external programs used to implement the Canna and WNN input methods, respectively. This is currently in beta.

mule-mcpath.c provides some functions to allow for pathnames containing extended characters. This code is fragmentary, obsolete, and completely non-working. Instead, pathname-coding-system is used to specify conversions of names of files and directories. The standard C I/O functions like ‘open()’ are wrapped so that conversion occurs automatically.

mule.c contains a few miscellaneous things. It currently seems to be unused and probably should be removed.

intl.c

This provides some miscellaneous internationalization code for implementing message translation and interfacing to the Ximp input method. None of this code is currently working.

iso-wide.h

This contains leftover code from an earlier implementation of Asian-language support, and is not currently used.