- make things way way way way slow. An idea I like is to
- be able to specify multiple display tables instead of just
- one. Each display table can specify conversions for some
- characters and leave others unchanged. The way the
- character gets displayed is determined by the first display
- table with a binding for that character. This way, you
- could call a function `enable-hex-display' that adds a
- pre-defined hex display-table (or maybe computes one if
- you give weird parameters to the function) and adds it
- to the list of display tables for the current buffer.
-
- Unfortunately there are still problems dealing with Mule
- characters. For example, maybe I want to specify that
- all extended characters (i.e. >= 256) are displayed in hex.
- It's not reasonable to create a mapping for all possible
- such characters, because there are about 2^19 of them.
- One way of dealing with this is to extend the concept
- of what a display table is. Currently it's only allowed
- to be a 256-entry vector. Instead, it should be something
- like:
-
- a) A 256-entry vector, for backward compatibility
- b) Some sort of hash table, mapping characters to values
- c) A list that specifies a range of values and the
- mapping to provide for those values.
-
- Also, extend the concept of "mapping" to include a
- printf-like spec. Then, you could make all extended
- characters show up as hex with a display table like
-
- ((256 . 524288) . "%x")
+ make things way way way way slow.
+
+ So instead, we extend the display-table concept, which was
+ historically limited to 256-byte vectors, to one of the
+ following:
+
+ a) A 256-entry vector, for backward compatibility;
+ b) char-table, mapping characters to values;
+ c) range-table, mapping ranges of characters to values;
+ d) a list of the above.
+
+ The (d) option allows you to specify multiple display tables
+ instead of just one. Each display table can specify conversions
+ for some characters and leave others unchanged. The way the
+ character gets displayed is determined by the first display table
+ with a binding for that character. This way, you could call a
+ function `enable-hex-display' that adds a hex display-table to
+ the list of display tables for the current buffer.
+
+ #### ...not yet implemented... Also, we extend the concept of
+ "mapping" to include a printf-like spec. Thus you can make all
+ extended characters show up as hex with a display table like
+ this:
+
+ #s(range-table data ((256 524288) (format "%x")))