Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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    Supporting property lists in Scheme raises difficult questions

Do you mean text properties in strings, as in Emacs Lisp?  These are
more complicated than an ordinary property list on an object as a
whole.

    such as:

     * What should the Scheme procedures 'string=?' and 'equal?' do when
       comparing two strings with the equal character sequences but
       unequal property lists?

     * Should Scheme procedures such as 'substring', 'string-append',
       'string-upcase', etc, propagate the associated property list
       data?

     * What should Scheme's 'write' do when applied to a string that
       includes a property list?  ('write' is analogous to 'prin1').

The obvious first suggestion is to handle each one as Emacs Lisp does.
For printing, a different syntax might be needed to fit in with Scheme
printed representation conventions, but that is ok.

     * Are there security implications to carrying around and possibly
       propagating (via Scheme's "substring") extra information that is
       effectively invisible to all procedures that have ever been
       available in Scheme?

There are many ways to pass data from one piece of Scheme code to
another.  Is there any real, usable "security" now, that this would
reduce?  Can you give an example?

Given a self-contained Scheme program, it should be easy to determine
whether it ever examines or sets string text properties.  Is that enough
to provide the same "security" benefits in practice?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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