Re: libnettle/libhogweed WIP

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Forcing your users to (de|en)code explicitly before calling your
> functions isn't making them jump through hoops: it's helping them have
> the correct mental model of what "multibyte text" means.

I agree.  While "just encrypt this string already" is a tempting thing
to be able to say, encryption doesn't really work on characters, but on
octet streams, so it turns into a head-scratcher when you get a weird
result.

But Emacs does have functions already that are rather... vague... about
what they do in this area and people seem to live with the ambiguity:

(base64-decode-string (base64-encode-string "Héllo"))
=> "H\351llo"

Which is...  correct?  But only if you know that the Emacs represents
non-ASCII strings as (approx.) UTF-8.

The less confusion in this area the better, and especially for
encryption functions where you really want to get the correct text back
again, I think it would be better, long-term, to not allow non-unibyte
text inputs.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no