Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

    The protocols rarely specify encoding, AFAIK.  If they do, we do use
    them, e.g., when decoding an email message that specifies its MIME
    charset.  But that comes _after_ we already have read the mail into a
    buffer in its raw undecoded form.

There is no problem in that case.  You read it with raw-text,
you determine which encoding to decode, then you decode that one.

What is an example of a protocol that doesn't specify an encoding?  We
need to look at some real cases to see what is the right way to handle
them.

When we look at enough cases to see a pattern, then we could come up
with a general rule.x

    And, of course, when you invoke a program locally, there's usually no
    protocol at all involved.

Likewise, we need to look at some real cases.  You can invoke any
program with M-!; I think in that case heuristic decoding is what
users want.  When functions run call-process on specific, what
decoding is really right?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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Boston MA 02110
USA
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