Re: please consider emacs-unicode for pervasive changes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Kenichi Handa wrote:

> As Emacs-unicode unifies, for instance, character C1 of
> charset CS1 and character C2 of CS2.  So, so even if an
> original iso-2022-7bit file uses the different byte sequence
> to represent them, when emacs reads it and write, C2 will be
> encoded by the same byte sequence as C1.
> 
> It doesn't matter for Emacs because when Emacs reads that
> file again, there's no difference.

As an example of a situation where it does matter, consider this: you 
visit a file, edit some parts of it, then save it.  It would be 
reasonable to expect that portions of the file you didn't change will 
compare equal to the original file.  In other words, running `diff' on 
the original and the edited files will not show any changes in those line 
you didn't modify.  However, unification means that `diff' _will_ 
sometimes show differences in unedited portions of the file, because C2 
was recoded into a different codepoint.

(Please do not interpret the above to mean I'm against unification.  I'm 
not.)