Re: creating unibyte strings

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

>> I guess I was asking why is this done in Lisp, not in C.  The
>> decrypted stuff is human-readable text, is it not?  Then why would a
>> Lisp program want to see the encrypted byte array?
> No, it's not. This is called from the backend protocol implementation of
> IMAP, for example. When Gnus wants to load a mailbox, it calls the IMAP
> code (Elisp) which then calls into GSSAPI to perform the decryption of the
> underlying packets.

IIUC the reason why Lisp code sees the byte array is because the module
cannot hook itself directly into the underlying network connection, so
the imap connection returns the byte-array to your code which then
passes it on to the GSSAPI module, which then returns another byte-array
which might be sent back to the imap server, ...


        Stefan