Re: setenv -> locale-coding-system cannot handle ASCII?!

[Richard Stallman]

    > If we wanted to hide from the user the distinction between unibyte and
    > multibyte buffers, we would have to change the buffer's representation
    > automatically when inserting characters that don't fit unibyte.  That
    > seems like a bad idea.

    Well I agree that it would be annoying if your 10-megabyte raw-bytes buffer
    suddenly got converted because you accidentally inserted a chinese
    character. :-)

    However I think that in many cases such a conversion would be OK, and
    since 99% of the time, people _don't_ mix character sets, it would
    probably be a win on average.

This kind of internally-unibyte buffer would serve only one purpose:
efficiency.  If we decide to eliminate the current user-level feature
of unibyte buffers, then we could implement this efficiency feature
if we decide it is worth the effort.

Whether to eliminate the current user-level feature is a bigger question.
We would want to make sure that we can offer the people who use it
a mode of operation that is just as satisfactory.