Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Eggert writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > The file or application is truly local, provided with the OS or
 > >      created by the user.  In that case on a well-maintained system,
 > >      the encoding should be valid
 > 
 > It could easily be mixed.  For example, in the Emacs source code
 > the output of the shell command "grep -r she *" produces some text
 > that is UTF-8 and some that is 8-bit EUC.  So the shell command's
 > output is not valid even though all its input files are valid.
 > This type of thing is not uncommon.

Not uncommon, but no more (and no less) sensible than "zgrep she
/vmlinuz".  Both commands are useful in some contexts, but neither
command's output should be thought of as "encoded text" in the sense
that any codec I know of can handle and produce useful output for all
of the encodings (or even more than one).

If you're planning further processing you shouldn't allow something as
mechanical as a codec anywhere near that stuff: you should accept it
into a buffer as binary, and do your own conversions based on any
useful heuristics you have.