Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 23:24:30 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> What is an example of a protocol that doesn't specify an encoding?

I'm not an expert, so I actually have trouble coming up with protocols
that _do_ specify an encoding.  Maybe someone else could help out.

>     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.

Not sure what you mean by that.  M-! and M-| is what I had in mind.

> You can invoke any program with M-!; I think in that case heuristic
> decoding is what users want.

But that's about 99.99% of the uses.  So perhaps we are in violent
agreement after all.

> When functions run call-process on specific, what decoding is really
> right?

I don't think there's a way to know that, except in a very few
specific cases (like speller, for example).  We currently use an
encoding derived from the user locale, but that's a heuristics that
has known limitations and known use cases where it simply fails (but
no better guess is available).