Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[David Kastrup]

Andreas Schwab <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I don't think it gets much more transparent than "unibyte flag only
>> marks the valid Unicode-in-Emacs character range".  I'm for the range
>> 0..255, Andreas for something like 0..127 U 4194176..4194303 which
>> I find cumbersome for little return.
>
> Before decoding there is no charset information yet, so using anything
> other than the eight-bit charset would be wrong.

When "right" does not buy you anything but trouble, why bother?

> After decoding, the eight-bit charset is used only for undecodable
> bytes.  That preserves the distinction between encoded and decoded
> strings/buffers (except for the uninteresting trivial ASCII decoding)
> in a world without unibyte flag.

The "uninteresting trivial ASCII" listens to case-fold-search just as
much as the latin-1 code page does.  So being "right" for half of the
coding range does not really buy anything.

-- 
David Kastrup