Re: Fwd: Re: Inadequate documentation of silly characters on screen.

[Alan Mackenzie]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 04:47:09PM +0000, Aidan Kehoe wrote:

>  Ar an naoú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Alan Mackenzie: 

>  > Hi, Stefan,

>  > On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:30:18AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>  > > > The actual character in the string is ñ (#x3f).

>  > > No: the string does not contain any characters, only bytes, because it's
>  > > a unibyte string.

>  > I'm thinking from the lisp viewpoint.  The string is a data structure
>  > I really don't want to have to think about
>  > the difference between "chars" and "bytes" when I'm hacking lisp.  If I
>  > do, then the abstraction "string" is broken.

> For some context on this, that???s how it works in XEmacs; we???ve never had
> problems with it, we seem to avoid an entire class of programming errors
> that GNU Emacs developers deal with on a regular basis.

In XEmacs, characters and integers are distinct types.  That causes
extra work having to convert between them, both mentally and in writing
code.  It is not that the GNU Emacs way is wrong, it just has a bug at
the moment.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).