RE: Loading souce Elisp faster

[Drew Adams]

> I think the breakage would be reasonably limited, so I'd be
> willing to take this risk,

_You_ would not be taking any risk for third-party code that needs to work with
multiple Emacs versions.  You would be making others jump through hoops.

They would likely need to split a file that now works across versions into two
files, one that works only prior to your gratuitous change and the other that
works only after it.

That kind of condional test is something that we should do in software: (if X Y
Z).  We should not be making programmers duplicate and modify files to
accommodate encoding/version differences.

> but I'd rather avoid having to go 
> to the end of the file looking for a coding: cookie.

Do whatever you need to do to find the cookie.  Demand that the cookie be in the
first line, if you want.  No big deal.

But please do use a cookie (some kind of explicit declaration that is tolerated
by older Emacs versions).  Please do not make things hard for 3rd-party code
that works cross-version.