Re: Patch: Promoting characters to 31 bits (for discussion)

Hrvoje> But who cares about that? You're not supposed to be Hrvoje> relying on the value char-int returns, right? Right. The Hrvoje> Who, and what for? The byte-compiler uses it in couple of places, subr.el uses it I think, w3.el uses it a lot. (I'm upgrading the system where my notes are, I can't say more off hand.) ucs-conv has a file or two that don't use much of anything else. Hrvoje> How can it be more reliable than the "true character"? Dunno. I haven't really started tracking it down yet. That's a paraphrase of a comment in bytecode.el or somesuch. Hrvoje> I understand and concur with the latter sentiment, but not Hrvoje> with the former. Sorry. I don't see _any_ appropriate use for those myself. Characters taken out of their locales are not integers: they are at best partially ordered (and in Unicode not even close), none of the arithmetic operations make sense, etc. And vice-versa; the operation `toupper' cannot be sensibly applied to integers. Any time those casts are used for anything but pure voyeurism (examining the internal representation), there's a flaw in the API. In practice, of course we need to support casts so that people can implement new operations on characters in Lisp. I'm not serious about "beyond repair." -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."