Re: wide-char is wide

[Hans Aberg]

On 26 Mar 2009, at 10:34, Francisco Vila wrote:

> > However, I agree the description of \char in the
> > manual could be clearer.  It needs to indicate the
> > hex string is a variable length dependent on the
> > character being encoded.  I'll fix it.
> >  Trevor
>
> This is what confused me. The integer argument to \char (either
> decimal or hex) corresponds to an Unicode code point, but the words
> "variable length" apply to the internal utf-8 encoding  for it, not to
> the integer argument itself.

Mostly, one does not need to know how UTF-8 represent characters in  
the computer - that is the beauty of it. The manual is though  
confusing as it relies on that one knows scheme ffor writing out  
characters.

It might say (or something):
  \char <num> (integer) Produce a single character, where <num> is a  
Unicode code point (character number) given in the Scheme format; see
  http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Number-Syntax.html
For example, \char #65 and \char #x41 produces the letter ‘A’.

(It is common in computer manuals to indicate variables that should be  
substituted with values with <...>).

  Hans