Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Stefan Monnier]

> But, the concept of unibyte<->multibyte convesion itself is
> not ad-hoc.  Don't you think their meaning is very clear
> when you grasp them as my way?  Do you see any inconsistency
> in my explanation about them?

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).

It'd make sense if the environment said "latin-1 when you can,
utf-8 otherwise" or something like that, but then we would use
encode-coding-string anyway.

Besides, if any non-latin-1 char is encountered by string-make-unibyte, then
we end up with a uninyte string that has an unknown meaning because some
chars might have been encoded in latin-1, and others in some other encoding.

I just don't know of a concrete case where it makes sense to use
string-make-unibyte.


        Stefan