Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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Regading files:

    We do ask, but only at buffer save time.  Asking questions when
    visiting a file is perceived as a nuisance, because our heuristics
    that detect these cases are imperfect and tend to have high enough
    false positive rate that annoys people.

Asking about invalid UTF-8 in a file could be a nuisance, but how much
of a nuisance depends on the details of what we do.  Since this has
some security implications, it is worth a small amount of nuisance.

What exactly did we try before?

Meanwhile, in a separate message I wrote about non-file operations:

    > We can set the defaults for those non-frile interfaces so as to reject
    > invalid UTF-8 sequences.  Then a program could specify to override the
    > default and allow them.

    That has been tried (not with UTF-8, but I don't think this matters),
    and failed miserably.

I don't think we are talking about the same thing.  I am talking about Lisp
functions to do conversions on text that does NOT come from files.
You seem to be talking about operations on files:

                           The experience taught us that Emacs users
    definitely don't want Emacs to do _anything_ about the unmodified
    parts of text, except copy it verbatim.  Even the question we ask at
    buffer-save time is sometimes reported as an annoyance.

It looks like you're grouping the two cases together,
while I am treating them separately.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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