Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Paul Eggert]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> you intentionally chose an example where you know it works, and
> published that on a public mailing list, without warning the kids not
> to try it at home?

It's perfectly fine for users to try "M-x grep -r" at home.  It's not going to 
hurt them.  It's a common idiom, and lots of people use it every day.

> There is *no barrier* to converting *all* files
> to conformant UTF-8, except a couple hours' hacking to make
> `help-with-tutorial' and `view-hello-file' recognize language tags.

I already proposed that for most files, and nobody opposed the idea; see 
<http://bugs.gnu.org/13936#29>.  It's just that nobody has found the "couple 
hours'" hacking time.  Although it's low on my priority list, evidently it's 
higher on yours; perhaps you can propose a patch?  It's not a big deal if you 
can't; I expect eventually someone will get around to it.

> Ah, so you've never lived anywhere but Kansas, Dorothy?

I'm well aware of all the problems you mentioned.  None of them are valid 
arguments that it's a "bug" to use "grep -r" in the Emacs source directory. 
Conversely, it appears that you did not read the file admin/notes/unicode 
carefully; if you had, you would not be asserting so blithely that there is "no 
barrier" to converting all Emacs source files to UTF-8.