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From: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
To: Olivier Galibert <Olivier.Galibert@mines.u-nancy.fr>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Subject: Re: More on Ebola
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Reply-To: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>

>>>>> "OG" == Olivier Galibert <Olivier.Galibert@mines.u-nancy.fr> writes:

OG> On Thu, Jul 03, 1997 at 11:36:42AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
>> Hint: what's the *actual* prototype for getchar(), and the *actual* value
>> of EOF? ;)
OG> int and implementation dependant. But this implies xemacs/iso8859-1 considers
OG> that at lisp level characters are bytes which is an information I didn't
OG> have yet nor was obvious.


>> DOn't suggest we use a "not possible in MULE" bitpattern - I once tried to
>> run XEmacs 20.1 or so in a Latvian UTF-8 environment, and the results were
>> NOT pretty. ;)
OG> Whether something is possible and whether it would be a good thing to do are
OG> most of the time totally unrelated problems. What Garry wanted was in fact
OG> an EOB value of type character and I was wondering about the technical
OG> feasability of that.

Then people will do something like (insert (following-char)).
Now if (following-char) returns a character that is "not a character",
what should happen?

The database community has had similar issues with the real meaning of 
NULL as a value for database objects.

Martin

