Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)
> Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2015 18:37:24 +0200
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >> From: address@hidden (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)
> >> Cc: address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès),  Eli Zaretskii
> >>  <address@hidden>,  address@hidden
> >> Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2015 14:54:59 +0200
> >> 
> >> Guile's string library is for working with strings (surprise!), not
> >> arbitrary byte vectors.
> >> 
> >> For arbitrary byte vectors, Guile has bytevectors (surprise!!).
> >
> > One of the major lessons Emacs development learned since Emacs 20.1 is
> > that raw bytes happen as part of text (a.k.a. "strings"), and
> > therefore there's a need to support a mixture of these two in the same
> > buffer/string.  I think that's something Guile should support as well,
> > as that will make it a more powerful and flexible extension language,
> > able to deal with a wider range of real-life situations.
> 
> Text as understood by a user of a text editor does not necessarily
> correspond to strings as understood by a programmer.

It doesn't matter how this data type is called, what's important is
that it should support both human-readable text and raw bytes in the
same contiguous stream of "characters".

> Though that doesn't seem to be an absolute requirement for letting
> libguile compile Elisp, since it can just treat Elisp strings as a
> separate data type, as GuileEmacs currently does.

That'd be an inconvenience, since it will require a translation layer
between Emacs strings and Guile strings, and that will hamper
performance.