Re: Buffer names with R2L characters

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: James Cloos <address@hidden>
 > > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
 > > Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:13:15 -0400
 > > 
 > > The bidi algorithm is just not designed for markup (and the <digits> tag
 > > /is/ markup).
 > 
 > No, it isn't.  Not every use of '<' and '>' is markup.

Please rethink here, Eli.  In the sense Jim is talking about, at the
conceptual level this use case is indeed markup, ie, metadata encoded
in plain text.  There may be better ways of solving the display
problem than taking that literally.

 > They can also be used in context such as "n > N" etc.  They are
 > just characters; XML did not appropriate them just because it uses
 > them for markup.

Of course this is true, but it misses his point, which is that in a
markup context, there is text data (in SGML, CDATA or PCDATA) and
there is metadata.  From the point of view of working with these
higher-level protocols, it may desirable that each run of text data be
treated separately in an editor.

There's nothing in the Unicode standard that says that Emacs couldn't
have a `non-bidi' syntax class, which when applied as a property to
text in a buffer would break that buffer into two or more bidi
"streams" to which the algorithm would be applied independently.

However, this is an implementation detail.  If life is easier if you
consider every textual object (buffer or string) as a single stream to
which the bidi algorithm should be applied, there's nothing wrong with
that, either.

 > This feature is still far away.  I thought about it, and concluded
 > that implementing it is not trivial, or at least there were a couple
 > of problems for which I couldn't think of a good solution yet.

I'm happy to accept your judgment here, of course.