Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 20:47:46 -0400
>> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>> 
>> We can set the defaults for those non-frile interfaces so as to reject
>> invalid UTF-8 sequences.  Then a program could specify to override the
>> default and allow them.
>
> That has been tried (not with UTF-8, but I don't think this matters),
> and failed miserably.  The experience taught us that Emacs users
> definitely don't want Emacs to do _anything_ about the unmodified
> parts of text, except copy it verbatim.  Even the question we ask at
> buffer-save time is sometimes reported as an annoyance.

As one data point, PostScript and PDF files generally constitute of
plain readable text (I seem to remember latin-1 with an option to use
some BOM in strings for getting UTF16 locally but I may be mistaken) but
with inserted binary objects.  At least with PostScript, the file is
linear and one can edit in changes if one wants to.  Obviously, any
unintentional changes in the binary sections are going to stop the
result from working.

This is definitely a case where you want to have better editing
capabilities than a hexdump would give you (as you cannot insert or
delete strings comfortably in a hexdump), but you still want the binary
portions to remain undisturbed as a block.

-- 
David Kastrup