Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/14/2014 12:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> in the Emacs tree "grep -r"
> is probably just a bug.

Although "grep -r" doesn't conformto POSIX, it is a handy GNU extension, 
and I use it a lot, both in the Emacs source tree and elsewhere.  GNU 
grep works reasonably well even with text files in the "wrong" encoding, 
and even with non-text files.  I don't expect grep to match UTF-8 
patterns to the corresponding EUC-JP text, because I know it doesn't 
translate.

Emacs's M-x grep command supports this usage well, and I don't see how 
it would be an improvement to call this usage a "bug" or for the Emacs 
(or grep) default to insist on strict coding correctness here.

Eli is correct that UTF-8 is the encoding typically used for text in the 
Emacs source code.  For more about this, please see "Source file 
encoding" in admin/notes/unicode.