Re: decode-coding-string gone awry?

[Richard Stallman]

        I think it should not be considered valid to decode a multibyte string,
        whether the string happens to only contains ASCII (or ASCII+eight-bit-*)
        or not.

    But what would it mean, in the other cases?

I see I misread the message the first time--I didn't see the "not".
Now that I see it, I think maybe I agree.

If you have a multibyte string that makes sense to decode, and you
want to decode it, you could call string-as-unibyte first.  That would
be a way of overriding the error-check.  It would not be hard to do,
and it would prevent people from falling into problems that are
mysterious because they don't know that the program decodes multibyte
strings.