Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Kastrup writes:

 > With the "we don't want to cater for raw bytes by default" attitude
 > you'll never get away in a reasonably reliable manner from the "our code
 > will not deal with raw bytes" situation you have now with regard to
 > string manipulation.

If Emacs and Emacs Lisp developers never can make it work, I think
that says more about Emacs than about the concept of standards-based
program design.  I'm sure the Guile community will succeed as Python
did.

It took Python about 3 months to implement PEP 383, another 6 to
actually publicly release a Python using it, and no, Python has never
defaulted to anything but strict error handling ("crash and traceback
on invalid input") since.

Nobody complains, because in practice strict is almost good enough for
interactive programs (ask the user to clean up the input and resubmit),
and the few who do need rawbytes are perfectly happy writing

  stream = open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8', errors='surrogateescape')

when it's needed.