Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:24:36 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden
> 
>     > I don't think we are talking about the same thing.  I am talking about 
> Lisp
>     > functions to do conversions on text that does NOT come from files.
> 
>     ... Emacs treats all of these cases the same.
> 
> They don't HAVE to be treated the same.  We are talking about changes,
> here.

They will be very deep and invasive changes, because currently the
encoding/decoding routines don't know the purpose of the stuff they
are producing.

> But changes may not be needed.  All operations that do encoding or
> decoding allow explicit specification of the coding system.

Of course, they do.  But the issue at hand is precisely whether it is
the application's responsibility to explicitly specify conversions
that will be strict wrt invalid byte sequences, or should Emacs do
that by default.  There's no argument that there are facilities in
Emacs to do both.