Re: String syntax ambiguity

[Eli Zaretskii]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> On rereading a bug report Dave Love sent a couple of weeks ago, I
> figured out that "^\341-\377" (a unibyte string) and
> (string-as-multibyte "^\341-\377") (a multibyte string) have the same
> printed representation.
[...]
> This is not a good situation--we should fix it.

Why is it a problem that two different strings have the same printed
representation?  We already have a similar situation with several other
strings, like Latin-1 and Latin-2 strings which use characters whose glyphs
look identically.

Or perhaps I don't understand what do you mean by ``printed
representation''?

>                          I suspect that this ambiguity results from
> the changes that were made to allow the codes \200 to \377 to appear
> in multibyte strings.

If you mean the introduction of the eight-bit-* character sets, I think you
are right.  However, these characters are not unibyte, they are multibyte
characters whose internal representation is never exposed to the Lisp
code.  That is, \200 to \377 don't appear in multibyte string, we just
pretend they do.  (This is not a very important comment, but I just wanted
to set the record straight, to avoid possible misunderstandings.)