Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Why/when is the distinction meaningful (given the fact that it
>> can only be used meaningfully with 8bit coding-systems where the
>> distinction seems more philosophical than anything else) ?

> It is perfectly possible to live in such an environment
> where only the charset iso-8859-1 is used but only the
> coding system utf-8 is used.  In this environment, the
> results of encode-coding-string and string-make-unibyte are
> of course not the same, but still both operations are
> meaningful.

I see that encode-coding-string does the utf-8 encoding, but what
does string-make-unibyte do in such a case and what is it used for ?

>> Until now, I always thought that Emacs only dealt with
>> - byte streams representing encoded sequences of code points: case 1.
>> - sequences of internal character codes (internally encoded in emacs-mule
>> or unicode depending on the branch you use): case 3.
>> Is there any place where we deal with sequences of code points of external
>> charsets really (other than in the degenerate case where such a sequence
>> is indistinguishable from case 1, maybe).

> I'd like to repeat that although we don't have such an
> environment now, it doesn't mean it is impossible to assume
> such environment.

I guess I don't understand how that is possible (and useful) and what that
would look like.


        Stefan