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To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Why 20.1/MULE? redux (was Re: 20.1-b15: success linux-2.0.30)
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From: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
In-Reply-To: Hrvoje Niksic's message of 14 Apr 1997 00:19:31 +0200
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Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

> Marc Aurel <4-tea-2@bong.saar.de> writes:

>> Yup, don't understand no Japanese...  Should I configure with MULE
>> anyway? [Pardon if that's a FAQ...]

MULE is more than just Japanese.  The creator of MULE (Ken'ichi HANDA)
is Japanese so naturally that's what works best.

> On the contrary -- we need non-MULE testers.  Most 20.x users and
> developers seem to compile in the MULE support.

That is correct.  In the 20.0 announcement I wrote:

> The primary new feature in XEmacs 20.0 is the support for MULE
> MUlti-Lingual extensions for Emacs.  It has only been seriously tested
> in a Japanese locale, and no doubt many problems still remain.  The
> support for ISO-Latin-1 and Japanese is fairly strong, so we're
> releasing it now.  MULE support comes at a price -- about a 30%
> slowdown from 19.14.  We're working on making things faster, but it's
> taking time.  Currently, 19.15 and 20.0 compiled without MULE
> (20.0-latin-1) are somewhat faster than 19.14.

> In short, if you don't need the internationalization features and
> you're not interested in participating in the upgrade path of XEmacs
> until the new code stabilizes you should use 19.15.  If you like the
> idea of running the latest code, but don't want to take the
> performance hit of MULE, don't need to have non-Latin-1 language
> support, and are willing to put up with the occasional incompatibility
> caused by the change to the character type, then you should use
> XEmacs-v20-latin-1.  If you wish the whole `v20 experience', then you
> should use XEmacs-v20-MULE.

If you don't need the language support specifically there are three
other areas in XEmacs where you might be interested in it.

1. Editing all of XEmacs source and other Emacs lisp source.
There is a growing amount of source code that can only be properly
edited in a MULE environment.  I expect the amount to increase
dramatically as XEmacs/MULE becomes stable and Emacs/MULE 20 becomes
available.  It's true that in a basic emacsen you're not likely to
damage the files if you're careful the same way binary executables can 
be edited.  For me it's like being blind.  I like to see the code the
way it was written even if I can't read the language the comments are
written in.

An example of a MULE toy is the footnote mode I wrote.
	ftp://ftp.miranova.com/pub/xemacs/footnote-0.10.tar.gz

You can make footnotes with numbers, boring English letters, or Greek, 
Hebrew or Cyrillic letters, or Japanese numbers.
2. Mail & News.
You might prefer to see people's names the way they're really
spelled.  The example I used last time was a mail message from MORIOKA 
Tomohiko (I use his name as an example because it was the desire to
see what his name really looked like that drove me to trying a 20.0
beta in the first place):

--Multipart_Sun_Apr_13_16:22:56_1997-1
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	=?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCPGkyLBsoQiAbJEJDTkknGyhC?=

	$B<i2,(B $BCNI'(B


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There really are more characters out there than 7 bit US-ASCII.

Gnus with tm, VM 6 with or without tm-vm are MULE-ized.  Gnus with tm
lets you browse fun newsgroups like alt.chinese.text.big5. :-)

3. Web browsing.
There are many web pages that are not written in a language readable
in a Latin-1 environment.  Sometimes you want to see what they are
supposed to look like.
	http://www.three-a.co.jp/%7Easada/Lynx-View.html

W3 is MULE-ized.

Perhaps another way to put all this is that XEmacs and Emacs before
it is the program I spend nearly all of my on-line computer time
interacting with.  It bothered me a lot to know that there were
things it could not do.

Anyway, you have to keep in mind the environment you're going to be
using the program in.  If all you're doing is editing ISO Latin-1 text
and you never come into contact with anything else, you're better off
skipping the MULE support and taking the extra performance.  XEmacs
20/Latin-1 and XEmacs 19.15 are about the same speed.
-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be billed at $250/message.

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