Re: String syntax ambiguity

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 14:40:04 -0700 (MST)
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> 
>       That is, \200 to \377 don't appear in multibyte string, we just
>     pretend they do.
> 
> Viewed at the Lisp level, these characters really do appear in the
> string.  An element of the string would be 0200.

IIRC, this is supposed to be a feature, for when a Lisp program looks
for 8-bit unibyte characters in a multibyte string.  That's because
the eight-bit-* character sets were introduced to solve the problem of
invalid individual bytes that appear in multibyte strings: we don't
want them to be left as unibyte, to avoid the byte-combining trouble,
but we need to pretend at the Lisp level that the bytes are there.