Re: how-many/count-matches for non-interactive use

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

Richard Stallman wrote:

   If this means interactive-p should not be changed, then we really need
   to look at the many existing calls to interactive-p and see if they
   should be rewritten to use the other technique.

This is going to be difficult (or infeasible).  I do not want to give
the impression of actually having _done_ that.  What I did was go to
the lisp directory in Dired, *% .el$ RET, unmark a few obviously
uninteresting files, and then `A interactive-p RET' M-, M-, ...

Some of the calls are obviously correct, some where obviously suspicious.
I listed those in my earlier message and sent a patch fixing some.

For most it was impossible to tell without studying a lot of code in
detail.  Just doing M-, until all files are processed without even
looking at anything already takes time.  So conducting a detailed
study of all of them is hopeless.

By leaving `interactive-p' like it is, we are not going to break
anything in 21.4 that was not already broken in previous Emacs
versions.  Better than that, we are in the process of eliminating the
most obvious problems.  Misuses of `interactive-p' do not seem to be
that ubiquitous that they lead to floods of bug reports from keyboard
macro users.

Sincerely,

Luc.