Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > utf-8-emacs is a private encoding used and understood by Emacs
 > alone, so encoding Emacs files in that would make them unusable
 > (unsearchable, unreadable, etc.) with anything but Emacs.

And who in the world would care?  They're *all* Emacs Lisp source
code, not even documentation.  They're all in languages whose scripts
are in Unicode.  So most of the characters will be ASCII, most of the
rest will be in Unicode, and the few that aren't, you can probably
forget about reading or writing in any environment but Emacs or an
extremely idiosyncratic one that isn't good for anything except
reading and writing old Tibetan or Sanskrit encodings (but not both).

 > As for using PUA, you have been told just a few days ago why this is
 > not going to work with Emacs.

That is a bet I will eventually take you up on.  It may not be going
to work in Emacs, ever, but I bet I can make it work in XEmacs. :-)

 > Your argument that Emacs files have no single encoding and
 > therefore there's no reasonable way to support them is struck down.

I never made such an argument.  My argument is that Emacs is alone in
choosing this particular "reasonable way to support encodings", and
that makes it difficult to cooperate with other projects ... such as
Guile.