Re: [emacs-bidi] Where do I start?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alex Schroeder <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 21:46:53 +0100
> 
> I read somewhere that you have a possible implementation in a separate
> stand alone program.

More accurately, it's code written for Emacs which can be compiled as
a stand-alone program.

> Is it feasible to make this available to other people?

I'm not going to publish infinished code, sorry.  I don't want buggy
code with my name on it floating on the net and haunting me to the
grave ;-)

The current plan is to make it available to people who want to play
with it whenever I succeed in plugging it into the Emacs display
engine.  The work on putting the code into Emacs should start VSN.
(It would have been under way already, but I discovered, with help
from the people on this list, a design flaw which caused subtle
deviations from what UAX#9 prescribes, so I went back to the drawing
board.  The redesigned code is now written, and I almost finished
testing it.)

> I realize that this is not often the case with experimental
> hacks, so if you think it would make more sense to do something else,
> say so.  I'd be interested in seeing a simple but working
> implementation, anyway.  Something that uses the Iterator structure
> described in xdisp.c, which uses caching, etc.

As I said above, the code is not yet integrated into the iterator
structure.

I'm not sure what would be the purpose of reading the code.  From my
point of view, it would be nice, of course, if someone else eyeballed
the code and reported any blunders that are still there, but is that
really an efficient use of the few weeks you have?

Asking you to work on that code seems not a good idea, either: it's
practically finished, so the important thing now is to begin work on
other things, like dropping that code into xdisp.c.

If all you want is some insight about the current design of the bidi
support, as far as the display is concerned, maybe it would be a
better idea if I posted the description here?  That might help
finding a good assignment for you, since I have difficulty coming up
with something that's clearly right (I do have a couple of possible
ideas to suggest, though).