Re: bidi-display-reordering is now non-nil by default

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii writes:
>
>  > Precisely and explicitly, I think that using lossy conversions is not
>  > a good idea, if there are practical alternatives.  Just visiting a
>  > file, then saving it without changes should produce the a byte stream
>  > that is identical to the original one.  I hope you agree with that.
>
> I don't.  Not in the context of Unicode.  It should produce a sequence
> of characters identical to the original one.

Not having the same sequence of bytes is painful.  There is a reason we
aimed for that with MULE when possible (some Japanese coding systems
don't make it possible) and with utf-8.

However, that is utterly orthogonal to the question how to work with
specially displayed/generated material like mode lines, group summaries,
help texts and so on.

For example, Emacs has a somewhat quaint mechanism called "fields".  It
would not make much sense to let directionality bleed over field borders
into neighbouring neutral characters, effectively moving them visually
across the field.

-- 
David Kastrup