Re: please consider emacs-unicode for pervasive changes

[Richard Stallman]

    >       In other words, running `diff' on the original and the
    >     edited files will not show any changes in those line you
    >     didn't modify.  However, unification means that `diff'
    >     _will_ sometimes show differences in unedited portions of
    >     the file, because C2 was recoded into a different codepoint.

    > Given that we are using unicode and unification,
    > isn't this inevitable?

    Perhaps it is; but it's something that might surprise (to put it mildly) 
    users.  We should probably document this in some prominent place, unless 
    we are going to take care of it.

I agree.  The change to Unicode will be big news and announced in many
ways.  For now, the question is whether this particular consequence is
inevitable.  Is it something we must accept, or something we can fix?

    > Text properties are currently fragile because they're often stripped
    > with calls of buffer-substring-no-properties and friends.

    Agreed.  Perhaps text properties aren't the right vehicle for solving 
    this problem.

I don't think this is a serious problem.  Things use
buffer-substring-no-properties when they are going to do computation
on the text, or use it as a command, etc.  Programs that move text
around do not discard the text properties.