Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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    Having mulled it over, I've come to the conclusion that we can add text
    properties to Guile strings without adding new security risks to
    competently written Scheme code, with the following caveat: text
    properties must be invisible to all existing Scheme procedures,
    including 'equal?' and 'write'.

That makes sense to me.

    However, as an exception to the caveat above, I think we can allow
    existing Scheme string operations such as 'substring' and
    'string-append' to propagate the text properties.

I agree, that's safe.  If the text property values have no effect on
the results of proper Scheme code, then whatever values Scheme
primitives put in the text properties, they can't hurt anything.

The reason why it is important to implement these at the lowest possible
level is efficiency.  If every string in Emacs had to be a higher-level
abstract object, they would surely be slower.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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