Re: improving query-replace and query-replace-regexp

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     When using this, the prompt and a sample input string might look
>     like this:
> 
>     Query replace (sep=" -> "): x -> y
> 
> That is an interesting idea.  It might be a shocking change for
> users, but it might be a good improvement.  It would be a useful
> thing for some people to try this out for a while.
> 
> But I'd like to remind everyone that we should focus now on the
> tasks in admin/FOR-RELEASE, so that we can make another release, not
> on looking for improvements to make.

Quite so.  While working off for-release points, one might come across
functionality that it makes sense to replace if the documentation
effort makes clear that a different solution with limited scope and
work should be implemented rather than the current one documented.[1]

But the " -> " proposal to me, while interesting, seems unrelated to
solving a problem connected with this release.


Footnotes: 

[1] Which happened a lot with the new edition of "The LaTeX companion"
documenting a vast diversity of LaTeX packages: the companion author,
when confronted with package behavior he found too obnoxious to
explain, often instead managed to convince the upstream authors to
change the semantics of their packages into something more worthwhile
to be documented.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum