Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     >     What will Emacs do, under this proposal, if the user is asked whether
>     >     to keep the original raw bytes and answers NO?
>     >
>     > Abort the operation, I suppose.
>
>     It's going to be a wagonload of fun if I do
>
>     emacsclient `git grep -l some-pattern`
>
>     in order to edit 30 files and Emacs decides to abort and/or ask each
>     time a comment contains a stray latin-1 character.
>
> I presume not many of these files will have raw bytes in them
> if they are in a system that is being properly maintained.

Like trailing spaces on a line and missing newlines before an end of
file and other whitespace errors: any attempt of correcting those
automatically or prompting for correcting them when you are just working
with material you got from someone else is going to annoy people and
cause problems.

Syntax highlighting may want to point such things out.  That's perfectly
fine.  But anything that disrupts interactive work is out.  I don't want
gratuitous random prompts interfering with the operation of keyboard
macros, for example.

Emacs' current behaviors are the result of dozens of years of user
experience and feedback.  Our current choices are not random.

-- 
David Kastrup