Re: `.newsrc.eld' saves chinese group name in wrong coding

[Stefan Monnier]

>> >> It could be, although it would make sense to manipulate group names in
>> >> "encoded" form, in the sense of "not decoded".
>> 
>> > It could ``make sense'', but it's IMO a bad idea, since, as we both
>> > know, Emacs is not well suited to handling unibyte strings.
>> 
>> Huh?  Unibyte strings are perfectly well supported as far as I know.
>> 
>> You have to be careful to remember which strings are unibyte and which are
>> multibyte, so you don't decode multibyte strings or encode unibyte strings,
>> and especially not implicitly (by inserting a unibyte string in a multibyte
>> buffer or vice versa).  So if you mean that it requires discipline, then
>> I agree, but otherwise I don't know what you're referring to.

> To me, the second paragraph is precisely the meaning of ``not well
> suited'' and ``not perfectly supported''.  What kind of ``well
> supported'' is that if I as a programmer need to carry with each
> string additional information, and make sure I know _exactly_ what
> primitives are invoked by every function I call, to take care that I
> don't inadvertently call something that deep inside assumes I passed a
> multibyte string?

> That way lies madness.

Agreed, but note that this problem is as much on the unibyte side as it is
on the multibyte side, so that seems to imply that you also thing that Emacs
is not well suited to handling multibyte strings.

This said, I agree that Emacs should help more.  E.g. by signalling an error
when trying to insert multibyte text into a unibyte buffer.


        Stefan