Re: Emacs registers above 255

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> according to the documentation, registers are characters up to 255.
> But the actual implementation is very simple and permits storing
> "anything" in `register-alist' using `set-register'; it's just that the
> UI functions use the "c" interactive spec, so you can't really enter
> anything other than a character inputtable without an input method.

Huh?

(defun weird-check (c) (interactive "c") c)
(call-interactively 'weird-check) => 265
[after inputting ĉ using an X11 input method rather than an Emacs one]

> My question is: would you consider it too much of a hack if a package
> used registers above 255 to not clobber the standard registers, but on
> the other hand be able to use the existing infrastructure (my example
> use case would be implementing Vim-compatible registers in an
> emulation package)?

You are assuming that a keyboard can only deliver single-byte
characters, namely that Emacs is the only multi-byte capable environment
on a given computer.

That's simply wrong.

-- 
David Kastrup