Re: Buffer-local variables affect general-purpose functions

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I think the problem is wider.

Yes, it is.

> But there should still be a way to compare bytes and strings of bytes
> in a unibyte buffer, right?

Byte-strings vs character-strings shouldn't be a problem, as the string 
itself tells you whether it's multibyte.  The problem is bytes vs 
characters, as both are modeled as small integers.

> So perhaps we should have special
> functions just for that purpose, and char-equal should signal an error
> when presented with unibyte non-ASCII values.

Sorry, I don't follow.  How could char-equal know whether 224 is a raw 
byte or the Latin-1 character 'à'?  It'd have to know that, to signal an 
error in the former case.