Re: Emacs Lisp's future

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

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > >  > utf-8-emacs is a private encoding used and understood by Emacs
 > >  > alone, so encoding Emacs files in that would make them unusable
 > >  > (unsearchable, unreadable, etc.) with anything but Emacs.
 > > 
 > > And who in the world would care?
 > 
 > Those who use Grep etc. outside of Emacs.

Well, no, because only those with a very special and very obsolete
environment would be able to search for those few characters using
grep, if they don't have Emacs.  The rest of the characters are in
Unicode, so can be searched as usual using the UTF-8 representation.

 > > My argument is that Emacs is alone in choosing this particular
 > > "reasonable way to support encodings"
 > 
 > What other programs you are aware of that cover such a large set of
 > scripts and languages no matter what is the user locale?

With Unicode support, *all of them*.  (Note: I didn't change from
encodings to "scripts and languages", you did.)

Of course, very few handle all of the *character encodings* that Emacs
does, but iconv and recode come close, or perhaps even exceed Emacs in
some areas.  Those programs, plus a little shell (oops, you're on
Windows, OK, *Python*), and you can do 99.44% of what Emacs can do as
far as handling file coding.

True, Emacs is a little more convenient in handling file coding, but
the majority of folks evidently think that is far outweighed by the
inconvenience of Emacs itself.

 > My point is that those other projects need to learn from Emacs first.

Could be you're right, but sadly, I doubt anyone is going to bother.