Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     >     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.

It's going to be a wagonload of fun if I do

emacsclient `git grep -l some-pattern`

in order to edit 30 files and Emacs decides to abort and/or ask each
time a comment contains a stray latin-1 character.

>     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.

The main point is that annoyance does not serve a purpose.  It's like a
secretary who refuses to file letters with spelling errors in them.

-- 
David Kastrup