Re: evaluating numbers

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Apr 29, 2020, at 12:23, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>>> Is that the reason why characters are integers in emacs lisp too ?
> 
>> If you are asking why this happened historically, then I don't know: I
>> wasn't there.  Maybe Richard can answer that.
> 
> I decided to represent characters using integers that just to keep
> Emacs simple and small.  In the 1980s, people wanted to run Emacs on
> machines with 1 meg of memory and a hard limit on process size.  I had
> to work hard to make that operate at all.
> 
> A separate character type would have required a number of extra
> conversion and test functions as well as read and print support.
> 
> Those space considerations are no longer significant.  But there may
> be another problem: whether there is room in the representation of
> Lisp_Object for another type.

Thank you very much for the explanation.


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune