Re: shift-select harmony

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

There's yet-another way to see the three-variable
idea.   I admit that this is an esoteric way to look
at the problem and solution but it is  a productive
way to look at it:

Think of something *like* Emacs but with this
difference:  instead of a "point" in the dynamic
state, the alterna-Emacs would have a "region".

What Emacs currently thinks of as the point
is, in alterna-Emacs, a pair of points where
the car of that pair is called the tentative mark
and the cdr is called the point (and more or less
coincides with the current notion of point).

In alterna-Emacs, there is no such thing as "insert".
There are commands called "insert[-*]" but what they
really do is replace the entire region -- not just the
point.

Well, alterna-Emacs is a superset of current
Emacs.   Current Emacs is a system in which
there exist no commands or primitive functions
that can be used  to construct a non-empty
current-region.    In current Emacs, the
tentative mark and the point always happen
to be the same.

The new functionality that is desired is a
systematic way to for users to define the
tentative mark separately from the point --
to create non-empty "current regions"
for primitives to use.

That's not a very big change, *afaict*, and
how it can be done is what I outlined in the
last couple of messages.

-t