Re: (aset UNIBYTE-STRING MULTIBYTE-CHAR)

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

>> If we are going to inhibit aset on multibyte strings, I think we
>> should inhibit aset on any strings to avoid a further confusion.

>> I think someone should try making it work.
>> The way I suggested should not be terribly hard.

>     The problem is the following: while it can be made to work, it will be
>     inefficient.

> That inefficiency may or may not be important in any given context.
> Fixing it in casefiddle is definitely desirable.
> But is it worth breaking all such packages just so that they
> will optimize an operation that might not use much of the time anyway?

Why work around the problem in `aset' if it isn't worth fixing in the
original code?  Especially since implicit conversion of a unibyte-string
to multibyte is generally a bug in itself (since there are as many ways
to do that as there are coding systems).


        Stefan