Re: evaluating numbers

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Nov 14, 2019, at 23:20, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <address@hidden>
>> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:35:17 +0900
>> 
>>> It's neither, because characters are integers in Emacs, and a
>>> character is identical to its codepoint.
>> 
>> How can I understand that ?
> 
> By reading the documentation, of course.

I wish.

>> I mean, what part of the documentation, or the code, or anything, is there 
>> to help people grasp this notion ?
> 
> ELisp section "String and Character Basics":
> 
>  A character is a Lisp object which represents a single character of
>  text.  In Emacs Lisp, characters are simply integers; whether an integer
>  is a character or not is determined only by how it is used.  *Note
>  Character Codes::, for details about character representation in Emacs.
> 
> And the cross-reference leads you to a much more detailed description
> of these issues.


"In Emacs Lisp, characters are simply integers; whether an integer is a 
character or not is determined only by how it is used."

([Character Codes] has seemingly nothing relevant)


[Character Type]

"A character in Emacs Lisp is nothing more than an integer."
"In other words, characters are represented by their character codes."

"Since characters are really integers, the printed representation of a 
character is a decimal number."

(btw: "Emacs provides several types of escape syntax that you can use to 
specify non-ASCII text characters." is not true since *any* character can use 
those escape syntaxes.)

Whatever I read about characters starts with the statement "Characters are 
integers" or a differently worded equivalent.

There is nothing that says why or how.


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune