Re: [Gcl-devel] utf8 and emacs text/string multibyte representation

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > There's no character data type in Emacs.  (XEmacs does have it.)

IIRC Ken'ichi has been thinking about adding a character type to
Emacs.  But that would be a big change.  It was worth it for XEmacs,
but I doubt it would be worth it for Emacs any more.  If GCL has a
character type already, that should not change.

Regarding "boxing", in XEmacs currently we have two tag bits at the
low end of a word, bit patterns ending in ...1 are integers (x >> 1
gives the value), bit patterns ending in ...10 are characters (x >> 2
give ord(c)), and bit patterns ending in ...00 are pointers to lrecord
types.  So yes, we always return a boxed character, but the
representation fits in a single word, and is not a pointer.