Re: String syntax ambiguity

[Kenichi Handa]

"Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden> writes:
>>  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.

We are not pretending that the bytes are there.  We are just
showing that characters of code 0x80..0x9F are there.

If it is desirable to distinguish the printing format of
those characters in unibyte string and multibyte string, how
about using hexadecimal notation for multibyte string (e.g
"\x80").

We can also make the Lisp reader to produce a multibyte
string when it reads that kind of string.  Currently, the
reader already produces a multibyte string when it reads,
for instance, "\x8c0" (A-grave).

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
address@hidden