Re: Creating a coding system

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 21:11:49 +0100
> 
> > I might be mistaken, but this doesn't look to me like a job for a
> > coding-system.  You are talking about parsing input into some abstract
> > notation,
> 
> "parsing input" is sort of bombastic for interpreting a binary
> representation consisting of isolated minimal words.

Yes, but coding-systems machinery is not a general-purpose bytestream
conversion facility.  It was designed and implemented specifically for
converting between known families of encodings.  You might be able to
tweak it enough to do what you want, eventually, but it doesn't look
like a piece of cake to me.  Programming in CCL is like writing
assembly code in a restricted machine language, hardly something well
suited to converting one complex bytestream into another.

> > then generating a representation of that input in a different
> > language.  This is sufficiently different from converting characters
> > from one encoding to another that you should perhaps look at
> > cedet/semantic/ stuff instead.
> 
> Uh, there is no grammar involved here, no context, most certainly not a
> push-down stack or something.

But there's definitely some kind of "lexing", no?  You are talking
about sequences of symbols, not about letters from some alphabet.  If
you try representing each sequence as an encoding of a letter, won't
you get an enormously large alphabet?

Then again, I might be dead wrong.