It depends. Usually configuration interfaces are made for two reasons: to be more "user-friendly" and to reduce the possibility of erroneous input that might co

It depends. Usually configuration interfaces are made for two reasons: to be more "user-friendly" and to reduce the possibility of erroneous input that might confuse the parser. In this case, the emacs config interface is (arguably), not "user friendly", and emacs is usually forgiving of malformed input (it may stop loading your config, but it won't crash and it will tell you how to debug it).