forcemerge 24309 6601
tags 24309 - wontfix
tags 24309 + patch
quit

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> From: Nathanael Schweers <NSchweers@mailbox.org>
>>> Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 01:07:06 +0200
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This bug applies to both the version given in the description
>>> (i.e. 25.1-RC2) and version 24.5 distributed on fedora.
>>
>> Actually, Emacs has behaved like that since creation of hyper-links to
>> quoted symbols in doc strings was introduced in Emacs 20.3.
>>
>>> - Start Emacs with “emacs -Q”.
>>> - evaluate these forms:
>>>   (defvar var "var" "docstring of var")
>>>   (defvar var* "var*" "docstring of var*")
>>>   (defvar *var "*var" "docstring of *var")
>>>   (defvar *var* "*var*" "docstring of *var*")
>>> 
>>>   (defun fun0 () "see variable ‘var’." var)
>>>   (defun fun1 () "see var*iable ‘var*’." var*)
>>>   (defun fun2 () "see *variable ‘*var’." *var)
>>>   (defun fun3 () "see *var*iable ‘*var*’." *var*)
>>> - See the docstrings of the defined functions.  For fun0 and fun1 the
>>>   reference to the variable is correct, for fun2 and fun3 they are not.
>>
>> See help-xref-symbol-regexp, it requires that the first character
>> after the opening quote has the word syntax, not the symbol syntax.  I
>> don't know why is that, perhaps to avoid too many false positives or
>> something.  The comment there says this was done deliberately.
>
> That was three years ago, and this discussion has seen no further
> replies.  I take the above to mean that we don't want to change the
> current behaviour, and I'm therefore closing this bug.
>
> If anyone feels that this is indeed something we would like to
> reconsider, please reopen the bug report.

I would like valid symbol names to be recognised more reliably, and I
don't see why allowing xrefs to start with symbol syntax would lead to
too many false positives, so long as help-make-xrefs filters matches
appropriately.

My personal motivation is that I would like functions from the Dash
package (that start with hyphens), as well as built-in arithmetic
operators, hyperlinked in Help buffers.

The attached patch matches quoted symbol names with one or more
characters starting with either word or symbol syntax in Lisp docstrings
and Help buffers.  WDYT?

Thanks,

-- 
Basil