From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David Kastrup Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs Lisp's future Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 09:18:35 +0200 Message-ID: <87siiv2hx0.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> References: <54193A70.9020901@member.fsf.org> <87h9ztm5oa.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <87d2ahm3nw.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <871tqneyvl.fsf@netris.org> <87d2a54t1m.fsf@yeeloong.lan> <83lhotme1e.fsf@gnu.org> <871tql17uw.fsf@yeeloong.lan> <838uktm9gw.fsf@gnu.org> <87h9zgarvp.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <83y4srjaot.fsf@gnu.org> <83r3yhiu8c.fsf@gnu.org> <83siiw9c6t.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1413015831 10288 80.91.229.3 (11 Oct 2014 08:23:51 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 08:23:51 +0000 (UTC) Cc: mhw@netris.org, dmantipov@yandex.ru, emacs-devel@gnu.org, handa@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, Eli Zaretskii , stephen@xemacs.org To: Richard Stallman Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Oct 11 10:23:43 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Xcrxl-0003ET-Lh for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:23:41 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:53367 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Xcrxl-0000bu-8w for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:23:41 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:43593) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XcrxJ-00008K-Gs for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:23:14 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XcrxI-0005S1-KZ for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:23:13 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::e]:43186) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XcrxI-0005Rx-I4 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:23:12 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:50341 helo=lola) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Xcrwr-0004LI-Sq; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:22:46 -0400 Original-Received: by lola (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 14501E06B0; Sat, 11 Oct 2014 09:18:35 +0200 (CEST) In-Reply-To: (Richard Stallman's message of "Fri, 10 Oct 2014 21:15:26 -0400") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4.50 (gnu/linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Error: Malformed IPv6 address (bad octet value). X-Received-From: 2001:4830:134:3::e X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:175254 Archived-At: Richard Stallman 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. ]]] > > > They don't HAVE to be treated the same. We are talking about changes, > > here. > > They will be very deep and invasive changes, because currently the > encoding/decoding routines don't know the purpose of the stuff they > are producing. > > No, it's just a matter of setting some parameter to specify a particular > decision in decoding or encoding behavior. > > > But changes may not be needed. All operations that do encoding or > > decoding allow explicit specification of the coding system. > > Of course, they do. But the issue at hand is precisely whether it is > the application's responsibility to explicitly specify conversions > that will be strict wrt invalid byte sequences, or should Emacs do > that by default. > > Yes. > > It will be easy to specify one or the other, so why not make the default > be strict, except in the primitives that operate on files? Because we had that already. It made the users mad, it threw spanners in the work of the programmers, and there is a large body of software developed before then and since then that depends on Emacs working rather than throwing a fit. When we lost users in large droves to XEmacs at the time Emacs became the loss leader for multibyte encodings by making MULE manadatory, a significant number of those users who went were the ones not even using non-ASCII locales, and they would purportedly not even have noticed a difference with the files they were supposed to be working with. But in practice, files and communications don't pass the purity tests. When you have a secretary working for you, you are not interested in the secretary getting each grammatical error in a letter you got sent circled in red. When I read a mail from an issue ticketing system that has not encoded/decoded some mail headers properly along with the rest, I still want to be able to read what is there _before_ making decisions about encodings. Most of the time I don't want to make _any_ decision and just go ahead with what I got. And frankly: if Emacs refuses to show me what it got before I make a decision, I have no _base_ for making a decision in the first place. -- David Kastrup