Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 09:16:20 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
>     I believe the commands that use shell-command-to-string are a good
>     example of these cases.  That function is frequently used as
>     infrastructure to query an external program about something, and the
>     result is then used, at least in some cases, to decide how to proceed.
> 
> 1. The scenario we've been told about is where the invalid UTF-8 gets
> passed on to some other program.  I don't think any harm will come if
> Emacs itself looks at the output of the command.  Emacs does not
> generally get confused by raw bytes.

What Emacs gets from a program it can as easily send to another (or
the same one).

> 2. It would not be hard to make another function (which does strict
> decoding) to recommend instead of shell-command-to-string for use in
> Lisp code in certain cases.
> 
> 3. It would be easy enough to make shell-command-to-string do flexible
> decoding when called interactively and do strict decoding when called
> noninteractively -- controlled through an optional argument.

I envision complaints from users if we do that.