Re: Characterset for Abbrevation names limited

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> I can't recover the original email so I'm not sure what was suggested,

The parent was off-list (for some reason...), but I quoted all of it.
The rest of the thread is in bug-gnu-emacs with the same subject.

> but if the suggestion is to make define-abbrev signal an error if
> the abbrev uses chars that are not word constituents, this will be
> problematic because the criterion depends on the syntax-table in use
> and that one may not be the same during define-abbrev as during
> expand-abbrev (some code in Emacs even uses pre-abbrev-expand-hook
> to change the syntax-table used during expand-abbrev independently
> from the syntax-table used otherwise in the buffer).

Yes, I did think about the define-abbrev case, and didn't see how one
could do much because of the reasons you cite. I think the suggestion
was perhaps just for define-global-abbrev, either to make it error or
warn if using a "non-standard-word-constituent" ([^a-zA-Z0-9] ?),
probably only when called interactively. As it stands you can define
"global" abbrevs that only work in some modes, which is a bit odd. But
I guess one could always construct a mode with a suitably bizarre
syntax that would still mess things up...