From: "Wolfgang Nádasi-Donner" <ed.odanow@...>
Date: 2007-11-20T09:44:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Still exists: Problems with \M-x in utf-8 encoded strings

David Flanagan schrieb:
> Wolfgang N��dasi-Donner wrote:
> The \M escape is a weird one, but it is really uncommon.

I don't know if it is really used somewhere.

> I'd be more 
> worried about the \xxx octal escape an the \xhh hex escape, both of 
> which allow the insertion of arbitrary bytes into a UTF-8 string.

Well, when someone does this, it is done with intention. I expect that
a programmer knows what (s)he does when putting "\x80" into an utf-8
encoded string, but "\M-." is different. I would expect, that it
produces a well-formed utf-8 String, if it is allowed at all.

Isn't "\M-." an extension of the old days, when ascii was extended to
8 bytes for having additional characters, which are not on the keyboard?
I remember DEC-System10 with 7 bit bytes, the "Meta" must be introduced
sometimes before (or by?) sun-workstations.

These special modifiers are without any sense outside the ascii world,
so to restrict the usage to ascii strings would make sense.

Wolfgang N��dasi-Donner