Re: Unicode confusables and reordering characters considered harmful, a simple solution

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> The idea is to make the programmer explicitly say yes to using these
>> characters.  (Or at the very least give them a way to say no, but I'd
>> much prefer the former.)
>
> IMNSHO, that would be a nuisance.  IOW, this cure is much worse than
> the disease.

I very much disagree that byte-compiler warnings would be "worse than
the disease".  Why should any user be so very inconvenienced by that?

Security will always be at odds with convenience.  The question is one
of striking a balance between the two.

In this case, I think asking users to add one line of code to those rare
files that need to use these control characters seems like a price worth
paying to improve security in Emacs Lisp as a whole.

Yes, it'll ask more from users that want to write Emacs Lisp with
strings and comments in RTL languages.  But they can also choose to do
nothing and live with the byte-compiler warnings instead.