Re: line-move-visual

[Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 6/10/2010 8:57 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>
> Based on the amount of bugs in Emacs, the wishy-washy semantics of most
> of its operations, the quick&dirty half-solutions seen in most of its
> packages, it amazes me that someone would consider Emacs as
> mission-critical ;-)

Mission-critical software isn't necessarily perfect software.  What software is?

Mission-critical software requires a clean architecture, attention to 
fundamental notions of reliability, a design that can isolate any potential 
problems and an ability to recover from them.  Even though you seem to think 
the semantics of the Emacs operations is wishy-washy (and I have pointed out 
some of them to you myself), the Emacs manuals - both the user's manual and the 
programming manual - are of quite high-quality and do an excellent job of 
defining things.  We can generally spot the portions that are wishy-washy or 
too complicated for comfort and stay away from them.  The use of Lisp with type 
safety and memory safety means that even inexperienced programmers can usually 
deliver code of decent quality.  The various fail-safe mechanisms, such as 
autosave, backups, movemail etc, help for failure recovery.  The large, 
professional user base, along with its age, imply that most problems have been 
identified and fixed a long time ago.  The small developer community might also 
mean that it grows at a manageable pace (even though that seems to be changing 
now).

When I was trawling through the net, I found somebody say that nobody ever lost 
an email message in VM (the Emacs package for email that I currently maintain). 
  When I enquired about it, it was pretty much true.  There is only one known 
instance of mail folder corruption, which happened due to the unibyte-multibyte 
transition of Emacs around the same time that Kyle Jones was retiring from VM. 
  So, the transition was apparently half-done and wasn't discovered until much 
later.

In comparison, I have lost loads of emails in Microsoft tools, lost files or 
changes to files in the Office Suite, had files damaged by Sun-Microsoft file 
servers, and had damaging system crashes due to hardware/device driver faults. 
  On the whole, Emacs has been among the most reliable of all the tools I use. 
  And, I suspect that must be true for almost all of us here.  So, please do 
own up to this proud heritage!

>
>          Stefan "who never uses Emacs while root"

I guess you will have to amplify this point for us to draw the right 
conclusions from it.

Cheers,
Uday