Re: Unibyte characters

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Text in a unibyte buffer is simply a bunch of binary characters
>> 0-255

> Here you are saying what I was saying: that these are just raw 8-bit
> bytes.

>> you can interpret them however you want, of course, but that's
>> not how emacs sees it.

> I don't mind saying that displaying such a buffer or string or
> movement by characters _interprets_ each byte as a single character.
> But interpretation and essence are two different things, and the
> manual does not make a point of telling that what it describes is the
> Emacs interpretation of such buffers, not what is actually held there.

> Thanks for the feedback, I will try to rephrase that text to make this
> distinction more clear.

IIUC, this part of the manual dates back to the introduction of Mule,
when many people were using Emacs in unibyte mode.  Nowadays unibyte
mode is not recommended (I'd even be all happy to remove it altogether)
and unibyte buffers should only be used for binary, undecoded data
(i.e. for bytes, not for chars).

So I agree with Eli that we should update this text to insist that
a unibyte buffer only contains bytes, and then explain that if the
buffer is displayed, those bytes will be interpreted in
a particular way.

BTW IIRC the non-ascii part will just be displayed as \NNN nowadays,
rather than in some locale-dependent charset (such as latin-1).


        Stefan