Re: setenv -> locale-coding-system cannot handle ASCII?!

[Miles Bader]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 06:26:07PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> It is possible that nowadays we do not need unibyte buffers and
> strings any more.  Perhaps now the only kind of benefit that
> a unibyte buffer provides is a speed advantage for Tar mode
> and similar programs.
> 
> But there may be another benefit.  Using unibyte buffers would also
> mean that the user will never be asked what encoding to use.  And some
> users may really dislike being asked!

The whole problem in my mind (I'm no expert) is the conflation of these two
uses for `unibyte.'  It seems to me that `efficiency' should _never_ be a
reason to use a unibyte buffer, because the emacs primitives should take care
of it automatically -- that is, a buffer/string's should have an associated
`unibyte encoding' attribute, which would allow it to be encoded using the
straightforward and efficient `unibyte representation' but appear to
lisp/whoweve as being a multibyte buffer/string (all of who's characters
happen to have the same charset).  Obviously inserting a character that
didn't match that attribute would be painful (causing the buffer to be
completely converted to a real multibyte repsentation), but well, don't do
that... :-)

-miles

-- 
Fast, small, soon; pick any 2.