Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 13:23:43 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: stephen@xemacs.org, handa@gnu.org, mhw@netris.org,
> 	dmantipov@yandex.ru, emacs-devel@gnu.org, mikegerwitz@gnu.org,
> 	monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, eliz@gnu.org
> 
>     So first I let the locale and other mechanisms choose an encoding, then
>     try getting at its choice of coding system before any prompts appear,
>     then I convert the symbol to a string, check whether the string ends
>     with "-with-rawbytes" and append it if needed
> 
> Is that really a likely scenario?

It is what happens with all our general-purpose commands and APIs that
invoke subprocesses, like shell-command, shell-command-on-region,
start-process, etc.  The default is to use the locale-specific
encoding, and users, of course, are not required to type any specific
coding systems when they invoke those commands/functions.

> I expect that a program, doing some non-editing job involving a
> network connection, ought to specify a fixed coding system in accord
> with the protocol it is communicating with.

The protocols rarely specify encoding, AFAIK.  If they do, we do use
them, e.g., when decoding an email message that specifies its MIME
charset.  But that comes _after_ we already have read the mail into a
buffer in its raw undecoded form.

And, of course, when you invoke a program locally, there's usually no
protocol at all involved.