Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Richard Stallman]

    This explanation does not really help me, because I do not know what
    you mean by "explicit encoding" and more specifically, I do not see why
    the current definition of string-make-unibyte is useful for doing
    "explicit encoding".

You said "a function that turns a multibyte string into a unibyte string
encoded in latin-1", so I thought you meant encode-coding-string.
string-make-unibyte doesn't have anything particularly to do with Latin-1.

We need string-make-unibyte as long as we have unibyte mode.  The idea is
that if a string holds text that was read in as multibyte and should have
been read in as unibyte, you can convert what you did get into what you
would have got.