Re: Emacs Lisp's future

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

David Kastrup writes:

 > I've been at the receiving end of the "reproducing the input bytes
 > faithfully is not a priority" mindframe, and it is costly.

XEmacs is irrelevant -- it simply doesn't possess the technology.  It
*is* a goal for us, I've tried, and that code is *hairy*, I failed.
So all your examples of pain you've personally suffered are irrelevant.

Nobody here is advocating "not a priority."  Engineering faithful
roundtripping isn't a priority for Emacs only because it's already
possible and robust.  I'm assuming that will continue to be the case
in a Guile-based Emacs.  (If not, sure, that needs to be fixed.
Nobody is saying otherwise, and I've made that explicit several
times.)

So the only question is "what is the default."  Please stop trying to
make this into anything else.

You advocate a default that is convenient for the app programmer, who
saves one project-wide "sed -i -e s/utf-8/utf-8-with-rawbytes/ *" to
achieve the same degree of insecurity and reproducibility his app
would have with the default you prefer.

We advocate a default that is safer for the user, who may lose their
life savings if a filter for 419 phish fails because a character is
encoded with "long" UTF-8, and fails to match the regexp which expects
the character and not rawbytes.  I don't know that there are any Emacs
MUA users who have ever fallen for a phishing message, but I assure
you that I personally have observed "long" UTF-8 in messages that are
otherwise duplicates of correctly encoded spams.  Those bastards don't
miss a trick.