Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Richard Stallman]

    But the question is then: what does it mean to read a text as multibyte?
    The input we get is normaly a stream of bytes and we need to decode it
    into a stream of (multibyte) chars using a coding-system.

You seem to be thinking of reading files.  I'm talking about handling
keyboard input.  If it was handled and accumulated as multibyte,
but then you want to get the result that you'd have got if it had
been inserted in a unibyte buffer, the existing string-make-unibyte
seems to be the right thing to convert.

Whether that is actually needed in practice, I am not sure,
but it does make sense as an operation.  So I think we should
not remove it.

    Undoing in the second case is done using the function make-string-unibyte
    I'm advocating.

I don't know anything about that.  The bulk of mail on this was way too much
for me to read all of it.