Subject: Re: bug#62009: 29.0.60; Emacs crashes on setf symbol-name

From: Daniel Mendler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:45:11 +0100

On 3/10/23 13:35, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:00:34 +0100
>> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
>>  [email-masked], Robert Pluim <[email-masked]>,
>>  Augusto Stoffel <[email-masked]>
>> From: Daniel Mendler <[email-masked]>
>>
>> On 3/10/23 12:50, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> Why bother?  Emacs is not in the business of preventing Lisp
>>> programmers from shooting themselves in the foot, certainly not when
>>> that incurs runtime overhead, even a small one.
>>
>> Of course Elisp is in the business of preventing programmers from
>> shooting themselves in the foot, otherwise we would extend Emacs in C.
> 
> We disagree here, and this is a very fundamental disagreement, which
> basically means continuing this argument is pointless, since we have
> no common basis.

I don't see that the disagreement is that strong. For example aset
signals an error if you try to access elements out of bounds.

(aset "abc" 3 ?x) -> args-out-of-range

So there are clearly use cases where signaling an error is justified. In
other cases you claim signaling an error is unjustified and a crash is
better. I don't like the crashing. That's the whole disagreement. I
suspect that you also don't like if Emacs crashes. Maybe it doesn't
bother you in this case, but in others.