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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:08:48 +0000
> From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> No, you (all of you) are missing the point.  That point is that if an
> Emacs Lisp hacker writes "?ñ", it should work, regardless of
> what "codepoint" it has, what "bytes" represent it, whether those
> "bytes" are coded with a different codepoint, or what have you.

No can do, as long as we support both unibyte and multibyte buffers
and strings.

> OK.  Surely displaying it as "\361" is a bug?

It's no more a bug than this:

   M-: ?a RET => 97

If `a' can be represented as 97, then why cannot \361 be represented
as 4194289?

> So, how did the character "ñ" get turned into the illegal byte #xf1?

It did so because you used aset to put it into a unibyte string.

> Are you saying that Emacs is converting "?ñ" and "?ä" into the wrong
> integers?

Emacs can convert it into 2 distinct integer representations.  It
decides which one by the context.  And you just happened to give it
the wrong context.

> What is the correct Emacs internal representation for "ñ" and "ä"?

That depends on whether they will be put into a multibyte
string/buffer or a unibyte one.

> > Because Emacs has no separate "character" data type.
> 
> For which I am thankful.

Then please understand that there's no bug here.