Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>

 > Indeed.  But that's what is expected from an editor: not to change the
 > stuff the user didn't touch.

If the user thinks of the "stuff" as characters, they will be unhappy
if the editor displays raw bytes for something that could be decoded,
and they will prefer standards conforming output, if only in those
instances where non-conformant output results in an explosion in a
later processor.

Of course you are quite right that there are many cases where the user
would be happiest if the editor didn't touch byte sequence that the
user didn't explicitly tell it to touch.

My point is that neither approach is always right.

 > > The solution obviously is to use a coding scheme for recoding that
 > > does _not_ reproduce unencodable bytes.
 > 
 > An editor such as Emacs cannot do that, I think.

It should do so as an option, with the alternative being to ask for
confirmation (this would be automatically satisfied if input and
output rawbytes handlers were separate) if nonconforming output would
be produced.  Emacs of *all* editors should not produce non-conforming
output silently (unless explicitly silenced), even if it got
non-conforming input.