Re: 10 problems with Elisp, part 10 (was: Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other)

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2024 at 23:31, Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> wrote:

> 10. Moving point around all the time.[…]
>
>     Frustration: What has this to do with my problem and
>     proposed solution? I understand Emacs grew around its
>     function as a text editor, but "everything is in the
>     buffer" and "the buffer is the data structure of Emacs",
>     that has goon too far and we see a lot of code being
>     virtually a very, very long traversal of buffers moving
>     around point.

In a differently designed API, you[^*] would have iterators into
buffers. And you would want from an iterator everything that is
available from the point, just that there could be many of them
simultaneously and that they wouldn’t affect the real user’s point.
And you would want iterators to be visible in the buffer text when
debugging.

In Elisp, you have save-excursion which protects the user’s point, and
markers which provide multiplicity.

[^*]: I.