Re: [Solved] RE: Differences between identical strings in Emacs lisp

[Stefan Monnier]

>> > the use cases you tried -- Emacs will sometimes silently convert
>> > unibyte characters to their locale-dependent multibyte equivalents.

Nowadays this should happen extremely rarely, or never.

>> On which occasion such a conversion is done?
> One example that comes to mind is (insert 160), i.e. when inserting
> text into a buffer.

This doesn't do any conversion (although it did, in Emacs<23).
160 is simply taken as the code of the corresponding character in
Emacs's character space (which is basically Unicode), hence regardless
of locale.

If this `insert' is performed inside a unibyte buffer, then this 160 is
instead taken to be a the code of a byte.  Again, regardless of the locale.

AFAIR, the only "dwimish" conversion that still takes place on occasion
is between things like #x3FFFBA and #xBA (i.e. between a byte and
a character representing that same byte).

>> It seems that all my related observations that puzzled me before can be well
>> explained by the strict distinction between characters and raw bytes and the
>> mapping between the latter's integer representations in the range
>> [0x80..0xFF] in an unibyte context and in the range [0x3FFF80..0x3FFFFF] in a
>> multibyte context.
> Pretty much, yes.

Yes, distinguishing bytes (and byte strings/buffers) from chars (and
char strings/buffers) is key.  Sadly, Emacs doesn't make it easy because
the terms used evolved from a time where byte=char and where people were
focused too much on the underlying/internal representation (hence the
terms "multibyte" vs "unibyte"), plus the fact that too much code relied
on byte=char to be able to make a clean design.  So when Emacs-20
appeared, it included all kinds of dwimish (and locale-dependent)
conversions to try and accommodate incorrect byte=char assumptions.
Over time, the design has been significantly cleaned up, but the
terminology is still problematic.


        Stefan