Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 23:24:03 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden
> 
>     > No, it's just a matter of setting some parameter to specify a particular
>     > decision in decoding or encoding behavior.
> 
>     Specify, and then drag it all the way down the encoding/decoding
>     machinery.
> 
> Could you be more concrete about the problem you are talking about here?

The need to know about the semantics of this parameter all the way
through the multi-layered hierarchy of our encoding/decoding
implementation.

>     > It will be easy to specify one or the other, so why not make the default
>     > be strict, except in the primitives that operate on files?
> 
>     Because I believe this will annoy users and cause a lot of
>     complaining.
> 
> Would you please describe a concrete scenario in which this might
> annoy users?

I already did, at least twice.  I have no more scenarios to
contribute, sorry.

> Assume that any operation which decodes text _for a user to see_
> will specify flexible decoding.

That means almost all of them, more-or-less.  So it goes against what
AFAIU Mark had in mind with "struct UTF-8".