Re: Emacs .gdbinit incompatible with latest GDB

[Richard Stallman]

     > Probably to make it easier to avoid incorrect conversions when
     > extracting elements.  We don't want to get negative numbers
     > for byte values above 127.

    Yes, that bit is self-evident but when are eight bit strings needed?

I do not understand that question.  Characters over 127 are used in
Emacs strings to represent non-ASCII characters.

    Mathieu Lacage stated on gdb-patches:

                                               ....a lot of people (the first
      which comes to my mind is libxml2) decided to use "unsigned char *" to
      identify utf-8 encoded strings in C.

That is likely too in other programs.  Emacs has its own internal
coding and does not use utf-8.