Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)
>> Cc: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès),  Eli Zaretskii
>>  <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2015 14:54:59 +0200
>> 
>> Guile's string library is for working with strings (surprise!), not
>> arbitrary byte vectors.
>> 
>> For arbitrary byte vectors, Guile has bytevectors (surprise!!).
>
> One of the major lessons Emacs development learned since Emacs 20.1 is
> that raw bytes happen as part of text (a.k.a. "strings"), and
> therefore there's a need to support a mixture of these two in the same
> buffer/string.  I think that's something Guile should support as well,
> as that will make it a more powerful and flexible extension language,
> able to deal with a wider range of real-life situations.

Text as understood by a user of a text editor does not necessarily
correspond to strings as understood by a programmer.

But indeed, it's foreseeable that Guile would support such things in its
native string data type eventually, when explicitly requested.  ISTR
this was mentioned before, by Guile developers themselves.  Then Elisp
and Guile strings would not need to be different data types anymore.

Though that doesn't seem to be an absolute requirement for letting
libguile compile Elisp, since it can just treat Elisp strings as a
separate data type, as GuileEmacs currently does.

Taylan