Re: GNU Emacs 21.3.50 : Problem in (point-min)

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin.Riefenstahl@epost.de>]

Hi Markus,


Markus Rost <rost@math.ohio-state.edu> writes:
> It happens for me also for other numbers. 

Yes I see that now.  I didn't investigate the issue besides just
trying a few obvious numbers.  I should have tried more *characters*
instead, that's much more interesting ;-).

> Buffer position 97 has nothing to do with character "a", so why
> showing "?a" in the minibuffer? 

Yes, you know that and I know that.  But how is Emacs supposed to
know, when both are represented exactly the same?  Emacs could just
display the number only (as it did before, I think), but than you'd
have to figure out yourself what character is represented by
e.g. 2276, in case you use a function that returns a character.

You could argue that ELisp should use different types for characters
and integers.  But it doesn't, and I doubt that that is going to
change.

> By the way, when saving this mail, I was offered the following
> coding system, apparently because of ?悍.
>
> Coding system for saving this buffer:
>   S -- shift_jis-unix (alias of japanese-shift-jis-unix)

Sounds like a feature to me.  Otherwise you could have lost the
Japanese characters and/or I wouldn't have seen them here and I'd have
had to guess what you are seeing.


so long, benny