Re: [Gcl-devel] utf8 and emacs text/string multibyte representation

[Stefan Monnier]

> Do these other lisps allocate a fresh character on each aref?  Do they
> maintain some ~2^21 sized table in core?  (And isn't emacs a "lisp"
> :-)).

I'd expect that dynamically typed languages that have a character type
distinct from integers all use an "unboxed" representation for those
chars (i.e. reserve some tag-bit combination for the "character" type).
IIRC, a unicode char only needs 22bit, so that leaves a lot of space
for tagbits.


        Stefan