Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Richard Stallman writes:
>
>  >     To put it another way, Mark said that Guile is intended to be useful
>  >     writing servers as well as interactive programs.
>  > 
>  > This discussion is about Guile in the context of Emacs specifically.
>  > "What Guile does" generally is a different, though related, topic.
>  > Guile could follow the Unicode spec in normal operation, but offer
>  > another mode that Emacs can use.
>
> It *could*, but it for the default is entirely unclear to me that it
> *should*.  Some use cases, such as AUCTeX parsing error messages from
> TeX (which treats content quoted from the document as bytes, and so
> may slice characters into two invalid byte sequences), will use some
> sort of reversible encoding of raw bytes (the current Emacs encoding
> is one option, of course).  But they can do that explicitly.
>
> However, in general I think that Emacs should help users who are naive
> about Unicode to avoid emitting invalid Unicode, and so should default
> to querying the user for permission if that were about to happen.  It
> should not silently pass on corrupt input to the output.

I repeat: that is to be the choice of the application rather than the
engine.  "We know better than the application writer what he wants" is
rarely going to work to the satisfaction of all.  This leads to "how do
I best work around the engine" approaches that tend to be much less
maintainable than explicit actions taking in a place intended by the
application.

-- 
David Kastrup