Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Richard Stallman]

    No, as a matter of fact I don't see why in a utf-8 environment,
    it makes any sense to have a function that turns a multibyte string
    into a unibyte string encoded in latin-1 (without even complaining when
    it encounters other characters).

There are programs that need to do explicit encoding.  This will
always be necessary.