Re: Inadequate documentation of silly characters on screen.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Sebastian Rose <sebastian_rose@gmx.de> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:
>>
>>> David Kastrup writes:
>>>  > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:
>>>
>>>  > > I meant pre-existing corruption [...]
>>>  > 
>>>  > That interpretation is not the business of the editor.
>>>
>>> Precisely my point.  The editor has *no* way to interpret at the point
>>> of encountering the invalid sequence, and therefore it should *stop*
>>> and ask the user what to do.  That doesn't mean it should throw away
>>> the data, but it sure does mean that it should not continue as though
>>> there is valid data in the buffer.
>>>
>>> Emacs is welcome to do that, but I am sure you will get bug reports
>>> about it.
>>
>> Why would we get a bug report about Emacs saving a file changed only in
>> the locations that the user actually edited?
>>
>> People might complain when Emacs does not recognize some encoding
>> properly, but they certainly will not demand that Emacs should stop
>> working altogether.
>
>
> People do indeed complain on the emacs-orgmode mailing list and I can
> reproduce their problems.

What meaning of "indeed" are you using here?  This is a complaint about
Emacs _not_ faithfully replicating a byte pattern that it expects to be
in a particular encoding.

>   http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgmode@gnu.org/msg19778.html
>
> I guess this is related?

It is related, but it bolsters rather than defeats my argument.

People don't _like_ Emacs to cop out altogether.

-- 
David Kastrup