Re: trunk r117396: Do not allow out-of-range character position in Fcompare_strings.

[Dmitry Antipov <dmantipov@yandex.ru>]

On 06/25/2014 07:17 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> That was a misunderstanding: the discussion has never been about
> emacs-24 AFAICT since it's not about fixing a bug.

May be I just misunderstood the development/release process as a whole,
but what "it's too late" means for the trunk?

> We don't have the behavior for aref, but we do have it for nth and
> gethash and people frequently rely on this behavior.

Hm...lists are mutable - you can concatenate A and B (with setcdr)
and get changed A but not the copy of A + B. On the other side, I always
consider strings and vectors as "less mutable", which implies more strict
checking (as with aref and aset).

> Now that it's installed, I guess we can try to run with it for a while,
> but I expect we'll get many bug reports from it because external
> packages rely on that behavior (just like bundled packages relied on it,
> or even more so since many external packages don't use string-prefix-p
> because it didn't exist back then).

In ELPA, I don't see too much users of compare-strings:

$ grep -nHR "(compare-strings " .
packages/company/company.el:1093:              (not (eq t (compare-strings (car candidates) nil nil
packages/vlf/vlf-ediff.el:323:           (eq t (compare-strings suffix nil nil string start-pos nil
packages/gnugo/gnugo.el:290:  (compare-strings s1 beg1 nil s2 beg2 nil))

I can check other external packages as well. Emacspeak?

Dmitry