Re: Fwd: Re: Inadequate documentation of silly characters on screen.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an naoú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Alan Mackenzie: 

 > On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 04:47:09PM +0000, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 > 
 > >  Ar an naoú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Alan Mackenzie: 
 > 
 > >  > Hi, Stefan,
 > 
 > >  > [...] I really don't want to have to think about the difference
 > >  > between "chars" and "bytes" when I'm hacking lisp. If I do, then the
 > >  > abstraction "string" is broken.
 > 
 > > For some context on this, that’s how it works in XEmacs; we’ve
 > > never had problems with it, we seem to avoid an entire class of
 > > programming errors that GNU Emacs developers deal with on a regular
 > > basis.
 > 
 > In XEmacs, characters and integers are distinct types.  That causes
 > extra work having to convert between them, both mentally and in writing
 > code. 

Certainly--that’s orthogonal to the issue at hand, though, it involves some
of the same things but is distinct. XEmacs could have implemented the
unibyte-string/multibyte-string Lisp distinction and kept the type
distinction between characters and integers; we didn’t, though. (Or maybe it
was just that the Mule version that we based our code on didn’t have it.)

 > It is not that the GNU Emacs way is wrong, it just has a bug at
 > the moment.

As far as I can see it’s an old design decision. 

-- 
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