Re: how can I tell emacs to treat a text file as html?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> | > But, note, what you should really do is byte compile the .emacs,
> | > using
> | No.  That's almost never a good idea.
> Is it a bad idea, and why?

Since it requires extra work, I think the more relevant question is "is it
a good idea, why?".

Byte-compilation, like many things creates basically a copy of the source
file (tho in a slightly different form, presumably more efficient).
So there are fundamentally two potential problems:
1 - the act of byte-compiling (can take time, can fail, ...).
2 - the presence of two redundant "copies" which are not kept 100%
    automatically in sync.
Maybe you'll never suffer from any bad effect, but since the .emacs file
rarely if ever contains any loop (the only place where byte-compilation of
.emacs has a fighting chance of having a measurable impact on execution
time), it's just not worth the trouble.


        Stefan