Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >     To put it another way, Mark said that Guile is intended to be useful
 >     writing servers as well as interactive programs.
 > 
 > This discussion is about Guile in the context of Emacs specifically.
 > "What Guile does" generally is a different, though related, topic.
 > Guile could follow the Unicode spec in normal operation, but offer
 > another mode that Emacs can use.

It *could*, but it for the default is entirely unclear to me that it
*should*.  Some use cases, such as AUCTeX parsing error messages from
TeX (which treats content quoted from the document as bytes, and so
may slice characters into two invalid byte sequences), will use some
sort of reversible encoding of raw bytes (the current Emacs encoding
is one option, of course).  But they can do that explicitly.

However, in general I think that Emacs should help users who are naive
about Unicode to avoid emitting invalid Unicode, and so should default
to querying the user for permission if that were about to happen.  It
should not silently pass on corrupt input to the output.