Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[Nathan Trapuzzano]

Nathan Trapuzzano <address@hidden> writes:

> For example, say we decode a stream of raw bytes as utf8, but that the
> stream contains some non-utf8 sequences.

Of course, most programming languages would simply refuse to decode by,
e.g., throwing an exception.  But that's not really appropriate for an
editor.  On one hand, you need some way to distinguish between
characters and bytes, even if the distinction's not made by the type
system; on the other hand, an _editor_ of all things should be able to
deal with both kinds at the same time without the distinction being
lost, and Emacs does a tremendous job at this IMO.