Re: ?\_ patch

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Damien Elmes wrote:  
   
   storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:

   > The Lisp manual doesn't refer to C syntax to explain e.g. ?\t.
   > So to me, \s and \t are equally self-explanatory.

   I agree. I also think that the more verbose you make the "proper"
   way to go about it, the more likely people are going to be lazy and
   just use "? ". Why introduce a whole new #\ syntax when ?foo is
   currently widely used to represent characters?

I agree with Damien and Kim on this.  I believe that the few times
that one actually needs ?\ are not sufficient to introduce an entirely
new style of character syntax into emacs.  This seems like the
proverbial sledgehammer to crush an almond.  I do not believe that we
should try to emulate Common Lisp in this particular respect.  I like
Common Lisp, but its treatment of characters is quite simply not its
strongest point.  Whenever I have to play around with characters, I
would much rather use Elisp.

I prefer to go for Kim's latest ?\s version (where \s denotes a space
even in "\s-a", since the super modifier is invalid inside strings
anyway).  Short of that, I would rather stay with ?\040 or ?\x20 than
to introduce entirely new-style character syntax.

Sincerely,

Luc.