RE: single-key-description no good for Japanese and Chinese chars

[Drew Adams]

    >     There is nothing in the documentation that suggests that it
    >     should generate a unique value for every possible key sequence.
    >
    > Maybe there is nothing about that in the doc, but doesn't it
    > seem logical?

    No. If that was its purpose, then it should be called something like
    `single-key-unique-identifier'. A "description" has never had any
    connotation of uniqueness in any context I have ever seen.

Nonsense. A description of a _single_ key is a description of a _single_
key, not a description of cows, butter, all keys, and the United Nations
flag. Description of a particular, _single_ cow does indeed imply
uniqueness. If the cow is unique, its `single-cow-description' should
reflect that.

Anyway, the name of something does not, unfortunately, always represent well
what that thing is or does, so I won't argue that point, and, conversely,
I'm not persuaded by such name arguments.

The fact is, however, that the name `single-key-description' does correspond
well to a description of a single (unique) key in all other cases. It is
only this case of multi-byte "keys" that seems to be broken in this regard.

    > Wouldn't the Chinese (or whatever) character itself (as a
    > string) be the best value to use as the output of
    > `single-key-description'? Or can't we have a string with
    > Chinese characters in it?

    I don't know for sure, I would expect descriptions to be ASCII
    descriptions, but that does not seem to be true for the £ key on my
    keyboard.

Right. I don't understand this stuff well either, but I see the same thing.

    > Again, I'm no expert on this stuff. I'm just thinking out
    > loud and asking. I'm thinking that, logically, I should be able
    > to do the same thing with a Chinese character that I can do
    > with some of the other "strange" characters that are bound to
    > `self-insert-command'. I see, for instance, lots of characters
    > that I doubt would be associated with a key from any keyboard -
    > and they all work OK with my code. They probably belong to
    > ISO-*, but I'm not sure they're on any keyboard.

    Most iso-8859-* characters are on their respective nations' keyboards.

OK, but, in any case, we are talking about supposed _keys_, which are on
keymaps. Whether or not they have keyboards behind them somewhere on the
planet (or on some planet), they should have, IMO, unique _key
descriptions_.

In sum, I would expect both `single-key-description' and `read-kbd-macro' to
be able to correctly handle all keys present in all keymaps - and by
"correctly", I mean with a unique description per key and so also a
corresponding reasonable behavior by `read-kbd-macro'.