Re: Should records be able to mimic primitive types?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2017 15:07:16 +0000
> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>  It's okay to disagree, but these have been the principles underlying
>  Emacs development since about forever, so please try to be consistent
>  with them as long as they are followed. I don't think a case for
>  making Emacs Lisp a more restricted development environment than it is
>  now will gain many supporters. E.g., even the move to make characters
>  a special data type separate from integers, something the XEmacs
>  actually did, was rejected by Emacs.
> 
> That's not my intention. What I have in mind is to raise more signals in cases where users use Emacs
> functions incorrectly instead of employing unspecified behavior.

If some usage is unequivocally wrong, can never support legitimate use
cases, and the defenses are not too expensive, then I think this could
be okay.  But we need to be careful not to disallow legitimate, though
perhaps somewhat dangerous practices.  Emacs's tradition is to trust
the Lisp programmers not to shoot themselves in the foot, so we
generally prefer to err on that side of the line, when in doubt.
Punishing the innocent on behalf of possibly guilty is something I
think we should try to avoid.