Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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    >     Originally, Emacs would complain that Latin-1 cannot be used, and
    >     asked the user to select a different encoding.
    > 
    > That is about Latin-1.  What did Emacs do, at that time, with UTF-8?

    The situation I described is with text encodable by UTF-8, but not by
    Latin-1.  So it has no analogue when UTF-8 is used to begin with.

It looks like that past case isn't directly pertinent to this issue,
then.

    What will Emacs do, under this proposal, if the user is asked whether
    to keep the original raw bytes and answers NO?

Abort the operation, I suppose.

    Our experience with such prompts is that they are perceived as
    annoyances, no matter whether they happen at read or at write time.

Maybe so, but how big of an annoyance depends on how often it happens.

Those who are arguing for doing something to avoid propagating raw
bytes might want to implement an optional feature for asking for
confirmation before saving UTF-8 with raw bytes.  Then people could
try enabling that feature and we would see how often we get asked to
confirm.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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