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From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
To: <rms@gnu.org>, "'Lennart Borgman \(gmail\)'" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
Cc: miles@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: RE: Default font 'default have no corresponding variable
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:51:46 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <008301c87373$eadf38b0$0600a8c0@us.oracle.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E1JRR8H-0005tr-F4@fencepost.gnu.org>

> Maybe we should work harder to document the fact that we do not want
> such variables.  Where would such info have reached you better?
> 
> How about if we put comments in and among the variable definitions in
> font-lock.el saying not to imitate that practice.

I think the place to discuss this is in the Elisp manual, in one of the
sections about faces. This is really about understanding what a face is,
IMO.

FWIW, I have a slightly different take on the practice to recommend and the
reasons to give for that recommendation. 

I agree with the recommended practice of defining and using faces, not face
variables, in general - and I follow it. However, I don't agree that the
only case for defining and using face variables is the legacy case of the
font-lock code. 

The use case I see, which, again, is not the usual case, is when you want to
make it easy for code to temporarily use a particular face. It is very easy
for some code to dynamically bind a face variable and cause subsequently
executed code to use that face. Getting the same effect with faces (without
a face variable) can make for uglier code, IMO.

Just one opinion. I'm not interested in arguing about that. I agree that we
should make it clear that you generally should not define face variables.
And I think the place to communicate that guideline is the Elisp doc, not
just comments in the code.





  reply	other threads:[~2008-02-20  3:51 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2008-02-18 13:18 Default font 'default have no corresponding variable Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-02-18 13:20 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-02-18 13:25   ` Jason Rumney
2008-02-18 16:12     ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-02-18 13:32 ` Miles Bader
2008-02-18 15:59   ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-02-18 16:37     ` Jason Rumney
2008-02-18 16:48     ` Stefan Monnier
2008-02-18 20:37       ` Johan Bockgård
2008-02-18 21:13         ` Stefan Monnier
2008-02-18 22:14       ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-02-19 11:59     ` Richard Stallman
2008-02-20  3:51       ` Drew Adams [this message]
2008-02-20 16:44         ` Richard Stallman

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