Re: Characterset for Abbrevation names limited

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    I can't recover the original email so I'm not sure what was suggested, but
    if the suggestion is to make define-abbrev signal an error if the abbrev
    uses chars that are not word constituents, this will be problematic because
    the criterion depends on the syntax-table in use and that one may not be the
    same during define-abbrev as during expand-abbrev (some code in Emacs even
    uses pre-abbrev-expand-hook to change the syntax-table used during
    expand-abbrev independently from the syntax-table used otherwise in the
    buffer).

We could leave define-abbrev alone and make the user level commands,
define-global-abbrev and define-mode-abbrev, do this check.

That way, ordinary users would be protected from the mistake,
and experts could still do whatever they wish.