subr.el (21.5.31) for 21.5.29

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an cúigiú lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Stephen J. Turnbull: 

 > Uwe Brauer writes:
 >
 >  > >> Regarding Re: subr.el (21.5.31) for 21.5.29; "Stephen J. Turnbull"
 >  > >> <stephen at xemacs.org> adds:
 > 
 >  > As far as I can see you submitted a C patch and when we
 >  > talked about last time you found that patch too, hm
 >  > aggressive. I strongly vote to apply it, since I
 >  > have not found any problems so far,
 > 
 > No, *you* won't see any problems with it.  The problems are entirely a
 > matter of style and clean internal APIs.  I think it was Aidan (or
 > maybe Ben) who deliberately changed that particular API in a backward
 > incompatible way. 

As it happens it was me; once the problem was reported, I was mostly shocked
to see that the API was being used at all. I would support reverting to the
old API in core.

 > I *know* that that implementation is going to change radically in the
 > future (it depends on Mule charsets, which will eventually be
 > reimplemented in terms of Unicode code point blocks), so I really don't
 > want to be bound to maintain any more backward compatibility in that area
 > than absolutely necessary.

-- 
‘Iodine deficiency was endemic in parts of the UK until, through what has been
described as “an unplanned and accidental public health triumph”, iodine was
added to cattle feed to improve milk production in the 1930s.’
(EN Pearce, Lancet, June 2011)