Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 22:22:26 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > >  > utf-8-emacs is a private encoding used and understood by Emacs
>  > >  > alone, so encoding Emacs files in that would make them unusable
>  > >  > (unsearchable, unreadable, etc.) with anything but Emacs.
>  > > 
>  > > And who in the world would care?
>  > 
>  > Those who use Grep etc. outside of Emacs.
> 
> Well, no, because only those with a very special and very obsolete
> environment would be able to search for those few characters using
> grep, if they don't have Emacs.  The rest of the characters are in
> Unicode, so can be searched as usual using the UTF-8 representation.

You assume that Grep and the terminal will not choke on the
non-Unicode characters.  There's no basis for such an assumption.

>  > > My argument is that Emacs is alone in choosing this particular
>  > > "reasonable way to support encodings"
>  > 
>  > What other programs you are aware of that cover such a large set of
>  > scripts and languages no matter what is the user locale?
> 
> With Unicode support, *all of them*.

Treating UTF-8 as a byte stream doesn't constitute "support".

>  > My point is that those other projects need to learn from Emacs first.
> 
> Could be you're right, but sadly, I doubt anyone is going to bother.

Too bad.