Re: Inadequate documentation of silly characters on screen.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > string-as-unibyte returns a new string, so no: they were not the same.

Sorry, `toggle-enable-multibyte-characters' was what I had in mind.
So, yes, they *were* *indeed* the same.  YHBT (it wasn't intentional).

I dunno, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but this idea
of having an in-band representation for raw bytes in a multibyte
string sounds to me like more trouble than it's worth.  I think it
would be much better to serve (eg) AUCTeX's needs with a special
coding system that grabs some unlikely-to-be-used private code space
and puts the bytes there.  That puts the responsibility for dealing
with such perversity[1] on the people who have some idea what they're
dealing with, not unsuspecting CC Mode maintainers who won't be using
that coding system.

And it should be either an error to (aset string pos 241) (sorry
Alan!) or 241 should be implicitly interpreted as Latin-1 (ie, ?ñ).  I
favor the former, because what Alan is doing screws Spanish-speaking
users AFAICS.  OTOH, the latter extends naturally if you have plans to
add support for fixed-width Unicode buffers (UTF-16 and UTF-32).

Vive la différence techniquement!

Footnotes: 
[1]  In the sense of "the world is perverse", I'm not blaming AUCTeX
or TeX for this!