Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.

[Kevin Rodgers <kevin.d.rodgers@gmail.com>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> Hmmm.  No you haven't.  You have noted one of the circumstances in which
>> a mark becomes active, yet haven't said what it is for a mark to BE
>> active.  It is as though a young child has asked you what "pregnant"
>> means, and the entire gist of your answer is "a woman becomes pregnant
>> after a kissing and cuddling session".  Unless you mention the growing
>> foetus, your answer is evasive and unhelpful, in fact not really an
>> answer at all.  What, exactly, is the essence of "active"ness, in the
>> same way that the foetus is the essence of pregnancy?
> 
> The problkem is that the activeness of the mark doesn't describe some
> property of some other state.  It's a state itself.  In your analogy,
> there's no foetus that would allow us to determine whether the mark
> is active.  All we have is the `mark-active' variable, so in the end all
> we can say is "the mark is active if the mark is active".

Can't we say that "the mark is active if `mark-active' is non-nil"?

Note that mark-active is not mentioned in the Emacs manual, only in the
Emacs Lisp manual.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA