Re: Sending multiple patches

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Unfortunately that is not the case.  For example, imagine a hypothetical
                                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^
As you say, it's hypothetical.

AFAICT, there's currently no actual use of regular expressions in the
"end pattern", so we very much can regexp-quote the whole thing (or
alternatively search it via search-forward instead of
re-search-forward).  If/when a need for something more flexible comes
up, we can allow the use of "a function returning a regexp" or maybe
even better "a function that jumps to the end" instead of a string.

> Do you think that adding Perl's \Q…\E support to `replace-match' would
> make sense?

No.  This would naturally lead to adding support for other operations
than regexp-quote, and then you end up quoting chunks of code inside
strings which is not only ugly but can't be macroexpanded, can't refer
to lexical-scoped vars, can't be byte-compiled, ...

If useful, we could extend replace-match such that NEWTEXT can be
a function instead of a string.  That should be easy and clean.


        Stefan