Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 19:58:08 +0200
> 
> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >> Btw, Emacs doesn't expose the internal representation of these bytes
> >> easily to Lisp programs.  That is, whenever any program tries to
> >> access the character at that position, it gets the original raw byte
> >> that was there before the string was read from outside.  A Lisp
> >> program needs some very tricky and deliberate techniques to access the
> >> internal representation of such bytes.  (It isn't "overlong", btw, we
> >> just represent the 128 bytes as codepoints in the 0x3fffXX range, and
> >> encode it in UTF-8 with 5 bytes.)
> >
> > Oh.  Didn't we use 3byte surrogate words (also not valid Unicode but
> > encodable as 3 bytes) here?
> 
> Actually, one could even use overlong encodings of 0--127 (to represent
> raw bytes 128--255) and use only two bytes that way, but that's really
> asking for reencoding trouble.

As a matter of fact, we use a 2-byte representation for them.  What I
wrote above about 5 bytes is incorrect, sorry.