Re: Interactive hat.

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Miles!

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:59:58PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> > Now the question arises, if we've got the property
> > `handle-shift-select', doesn't the "^" in the interactive string become
> > redundant?

> Not at all.  For the vast majority of uses -- functions distributed with
> emacs (and in external packages that don't care about xemacs or older
> versions of emacs), it's more convenient and prettier.

It is, perhaps, more convenient, but prettier?  Well, let's just say
that it is possible to take different viewpoints on this.  Mine is that
it's an ugly hack, utterly different from anything that's gone before,
and it will have negative implications, not all of which will be
foreseen before the release of Emacs 23.  I think it's more "clever"
than smart, a bit like C++'s abuse of the shift-left operator:

    cout << (byte_count << 3) ;

.  Somebody will end up having to code round it.  

If it's possible to code everything we need with a symbol property, I
think the interactive hat mechanism should be removed.

There are currently only 28 defuns (in simple.el, lisp.el and
paragraphs.el) which use this, so changing them to use a property
instead would be a trivial amount of work.

> -Miles

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).