bug#24269: 24.5; Add optional arg to `eval-buffer' and `eval-region' to ignore invisible text

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > Enhancement request.  Add an optional argument to `eval-buffer' and
> > `eval-region'.  When it is non-nil, ignore text that is invisible.
> >
> > More generally, maybe: if a (non-nil) symbol, interpret the symbol as
> a
> > text property, and ignore any text that has a non-nil value of that
> > property.
> 
> I don't think that sounds like a clean interface for these functions.
> If you need stuff like this, it sounds like you should just write
> functions that do this for you.  Closing.

It's not about me (or anyone) _needing_ this
behavior.  It's about the _use cases_ of these
two commands.

It just _makes sense_ for these existing commands
to let you ignore certain zones of text.

They already do that (naturally) for sexps in
comments.  Instead of commenting out a zone to
have it ignored, you could well want to eval
only specific zones of text.

That's in fact the _only_ use case of `eval-region':
it ignores text outside the region.  Without this
command you would need to narrow the buffer and then
use `eval-buffer'.

Would you argue, using your same logic, that we
should get rid of `eval-region' because you can
always just narrow and use `eval-buffer'?