18 MULE Character Sets and Encodings

Recall that there are two primary ways that text is represented in SXEmacs. The buffer representation sees the text as a series of bytes (Bufbytes), with a variable number of bytes used per character. The character representation sees the text as a series of integers (Emchars), one per character. The character representation is a cleaner representation from a theoretical standpoint, and is thus used in many cases when lots of manipulations on a string need to be done. However, the buffer representation is the standard representation used in both Lisp strings and buffers, and because of this, it is the “default” representation that text comes in. The reason for using this representation is that it’s compact and is compatible with ASCII.