Re: Emacs-diffs Digest, Vol 2, Issue 28

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <E18b2yg-0007yl-00@fencepost.gnu.org>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>     string-make-multibyte
>     string-as-multibyte
>     string-to-multibyte

> These three are all useful.

>     string-make-unibyte
>     string-as-unibyte
>     string-to-unibyte (perpaps the same as string-as-unibyte, or
> 		      it should signal an error if non-ascii,
> 		      non-eight-bit-XXX is contained).

> I don't see a need to add string-to-unibyte.

We have string-as/make-multibyte and string-as/make-unibyte.
If one finds string-to-multibyte, it's quite natural that he
also expects string-to-unibyte.  Even if it is an alias of
string-as-unibyte, I think it's worth having it.  And, it's
simpler to have it than saying that we don't have
string-to-unibyte because ... in some place.

And I think it's better that it signals an error as written
above.

>     buffer-make-multibyte
>     buffer-as-multibyte (same as (set-buffer-multibyte BUFFER t))
>     buffer-to-multibyte

> I don't think buffer-make-multibyte and buffer-to-multibyte are
> useful.  What is useful is to have functions to operate on a region in
> a multibyte buffer, transforming the text between these three
> different representations.  (Some of the 6 transformations may be
> meaningless or impossible; we should only support the meaningful
> ones.)

I don't agree with having such function.  I think such a
case is where we have to use decode/encode-coding-region.
Eight-bit chars in a multibyte buffer actually represent
raw-bytes.  Then the operation of turing them to characters
is "decoding", not transforming.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@m17n.org