Re: `.newsrc.eld' saves chinese group name in wrong coding

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    > However, if you store encoded text in unibyte strings, you are
    > responsible for decoding and encoding when necessary.  You have to
    > keep track, everywhere, of whether the data is encoded or not.

    It's pretty easy to keep track of it: unibyte == encoded, multibyte
    == decoded.

What you're proposing is a convention which a certain program could
use internally.  It might be a workable convention for some purposes.
But it is not automatic, and not required by Emacs.

    > You can represent one of Emacs' supported Latin alphabets in
    > (unencoded) unibyte strings, and Emacs will automatically convert to
    > and from multibyte.

    And this use was very convenient for Emacs-20 where we wanted to keep some
    backward compatibility with code that was not MULE-aware.

    But nowadays any code which relies on this is simply broken, AFAIC, because
    it'll only work in environments using a iso-8859 encoding (more or less)

I think you're mistaken.  The conversion between unibyte and multibyte
involves internal Emacs characters.  It concerns character sets, not
coding systems.

However, it is true that the use of unibyte strings is only applicable
to alphabets such as could be represented in unibyte strings.