Re: [simon.marshall@misys.com: Font Lock on-the-fly misfontification in C++]

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> writes:

>  Ar an dara lá de mí Lúnasa, scríobh David Kastrup: 
>
>  > > As Stallman hijacked the name of TECO Emacs (which editor he did not
>  > > come up with on his own, remember) before them.
>  > 
>  > Please get your history right, for example by looking at
>  > <URL:http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html>.  The name "Emacs"
>  > came first into use for a system coauthored by Richard.
>
> Please read what I write before replying to it.
>
>  > [...] As you can see, the name "Emacs" is still used to refer to XEmacs.
>
> ... in contexts where it shares behaviour with GNU Emacs.

But it doesn't.  That's the point.  It shares, at best, behavior with
an ancient version of Emacs.  XEmacs developers can't be reasonably
expected to track the progress of Emacs development and change those
instances of "Emacs" in their manual whenever Emacs has moved past the
state described in the XEmacs manual.  And it would be nonsensical to
do a tracking project of this kind.  The XEmacs manual describes
XEmacs and tracks XEmacs development, and so there is little point in
referring to "Emacs" when Emacs might do things completely different.

The XEmacs Lisp reference also states right in the beginning under
"Caveats":

       This manual was originally written for FSF Emacs 19 and was
    updated by Ben Wing (ben@xemacs.org) for Lucid Emacs 19.10 and
    later for XEmacs 19.12, 19.13, 19.14, and 20.0.  It was further
    updated by the XEmacs Development Team for 19.15 and 20.1.  Please
    send comments and corrections relating to XEmacs-specific portions
    of this manual to xemacs@xemacs.org

> As I wrote before.  If it’s used to describe XEmacs-specific
> behaviouir, that’s something we need to fix.

And who is going to track changes in Emacs, so that he can keep up
with fixing the references?  Really, this makes no sense.  Anyway, I
quoted from introductory material and explanatory material, the stuff
that you reference as a newbie if you want to figure out things.  And
whether or not the mind frame of active XEmacs developers has moved on
beyond the time where this material was written, it is still out there
and teaching people who read it.

I don't really think you should protest too much if Emacs developers
have decided to maintain the distinction between Emacs and XEmacs in
the sort of documentation they are responsible for, and that includes
the documentation of code placed within Emacs and distributed as part
as Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum