Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>
>  > Newsflash: Emacs 19 has been released in the mean time.  That's good
>  > since we have an example we can study now with regard to the problems
>  > text properties may cause.
>
> Newsflash: we're not talking about text properties in Emacs, which has
> historically been hostile to both embedding in other apps and to FFIs,
> and is not normally used as a network daemon,

It is used as a network application (I mean, what else to use as news
and mail reader?).  There are currently discussions on the list about
the way to do TLS in a secure manner.

> We're talking about text properties in Guile, which is designed for
> embedding and and extension (including wrapping foreign functions).  A
> Guile with text properties hasn't been written, let alone released
> AFAIK.  I dunno about the "network daemon" part, but Mark mentioned
> that as a target application area for Guile.

Text properties are not in files or network streams.  They will not
magically materialize and cause trouble.

> It would be "nice" and "efficient" for Guile to implement properties
> natively so that Emacs could just use those, but Mark is correct to
> worry that those properties would be used to bypass validation modules
> written for pre-property Guile versions.

Sigh.  At any rate, this is basically a non-issue since GUILE is
perfectly capable of supporting custom extensible string type stacks on
the existing commands like it provides a custom extensible numeric type
stack.  Its object programming system GOOPS has been designed for that
sort of extensibility.

-- 
David Kastrup