Re: Bugs in newly added completion capabilities.

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   Could you fix the doc strings, and the manual, to explain that a list
   of symbols needs "" at the front in order to be valid as a completion
   table?

Yes, but let me first make sure I understand.  Is the reason that we
do not want _any_ symbol as car of the list that forbidding _any_
symbol as car of the list actually seems _more natural_ than just
forbidding lambda?  It seems that any symbol other than lambda can not
be mistaken for the car of an anonymous lambda expresion and hence
could not lead to ambiguity.

To make sure that there is no confusion:

ELISP> (try-completion "b" '(aa bb))
*** Eval error ***  Invalid function: (aa bb)

Note that `try-completion' does not believe that aa is a function
called with argument bb.  It believes that (aa bb) is an anonymous
lambda expression.  It could know that it is not, because the car is
not lambda.  (That is what the patch I sent did.  It checked whether
the car was lambda.)

   I agree, test-completion should be fixed.  Would you like
   to fix that?

There are several ways to do that.  The easiest one would probably be
to make assoc-string be able to handle symbols as well as strings.
But maybe that would be too radical?

Sincerely,

Luc.