Re: Buffer-local variables affect general-purpose functions

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:32:05 -0700
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > do we want to do something about that?
> 
> Yes, and we should start by removing the backwards-compatibility hacks 
> in question.  Whether the current buffer is unibyte should not affect 
> the behavior of general-purpose functions on characters.

Well, the change in behavior is not limited to unibyte buffers, as I
told in my OP.  I think the problem is wider.

> Elisp code that blindly extracts bytes from unibyte buffers or strings, 
> and treats these bytes as characters, is broken anyway.  It needs to be 
> fixed to convert bytes to characters (using 'unibyte-char-to-multibyte', 
> say) before it gives them to general-purpose character functions like 
> 'downcase' and 'char-equal'.

But there should still be a way to compare bytes and strings of bytes
in a unibyte buffer, right?  So perhaps we should have special
functions just for that purpose, and char-equal should signal an error
when presented with unibyte non-ASCII values.