Re: Call for volunteers: add tree-sitter support to major modes

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Yes, but Emacs is not only for editing computer programs.  It is also
> for editing human-readable text, email exchange, writing program
> documentation, and other areas where support for various scripts and
> languages is important.  Otherwise, why would we invest such a
> significant effort into providing and developing those features?  Why
> did Emacs so painstakingly go from unibyte text representation to
> multibyte in version 20?

Program documentation is mostly written in English.  But anyway, see
below.

> Actually, they are: in comments and strings.
>
> Anyway, this line of reasoning is a non-starter.  You are, in effect,
> denying the whole chunk of Emacs history and development since the
> late 90s.

No.  Support for many different scripts is obviously nice-to-have, but
is not at all crucial for a text editor that primarily edits code.

> The same will arguably happen with tree-sitter, once Emacs starts
> using it seriously.

I'm sorry, but I really cannot agree there.  Emacs aside, only niche
editors utilize tree-sitter to provide core parsing functionality.

No operating system will start including it by default just because
it has become an important dependency of Emacs.

> Of course, it is.

What feature in Emacs requires connecting to the internet to work?
package.el aside: packages can easily be retrieved via ftp, installed
manually, and are not required for Emacs to work well.