Re: Rationale for split-string?

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

I am personally always weary of changing existing documented behavior.
Sometimes it is necessary, but even then it is a necessary evil.
There is, of course, the possibility of breaking existing code.  We do
not know "all existing code", so just grepping through stuff does not
solve the problem.  It also makes life hard on people trying to write
packages that are portable between Emacs versions.

My own suggestion would be to add a new optional argument, say
delete-null-matches to split-string.  The value could be "all", "none"
or "edges" and maybe even "beginning" and "end" (but that would be a
luxury).  For Emacs a value of nil would be equivalent with "edges"
(the current behavior), for XEmacs it would be equivalent with "none",
XEmacs' current behavior.  No existing Emacs or XEmacs code would get
broken, and people worried about Emacs-XEmacs compatibility could
always give an explicit non-nil value, which would be interpreted in
exactly the same way by Emacs and XEmacs.

Sincerely,

Luc.