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

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Stefan,

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:30:18AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > The actual character in the string is ñ (#x3f).

> No: the string does not contain any characters, only bytes, because it's
> a unibyte string.

I'm thinking from the lisp viewpoint.  The string is a data structure
which contains characters.  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.

> So it contains the byte 241, not the character ñ.

That is then a bug.  I wrote "(aset nl 0 ?ñ)", not "(aset nl 0 241)".

> The byte 241 can be inserted in multibyte strings and buffers because
> it is also a char of code 4194289 (which gets displayed as \361).

Hang on a mo'!  How can the byte 241 "be" a char of code 4194289?  This
is some strange usage of the word "be" that I wasn't previously aware
of.  ;-)

At this point, would you please just agree with me that when I do

   (setq nl "\n")
   (aset nl 0 ?ñ)
   (insert nl)

, what should appear on the screen should be "ñ", NOT "\361"?  Thanks!

>         Stefan

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).