Re: save-excursion and the mark

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Magnar

While I can appreciate your point (oops, pun). But, while introducing a
new macro and effectively deprecating save-excursion would be safe, it
would be unlikely to have any real effects at all, simply because as you
say Emacs is very stable. That is, the vast majority of save-excursion
calls will never get changed, even if save-excursion is deprecated.

Changing "save-excursion" and introducing "save-mark-excursion" would be
another possibility (although the latter would have  the difficulties
that Stefan has described with, for example, activate-mark-hook.

Phil

Magnar Sveen <magnars@gmail.com> writes:

> There are millions of lines of elisp that you've never seen. Emacs is after
> all the eminently hackable editor. And you're making breaking changes to a
> core API out of a sense of cleanliness? You've now been made aware of one
> case where the change is harmful, and your conclusion is "this is the one
> case where it is harmful". No, it's the first case where it's been detected
> - and that's because expand-region is widely used by thousands of people -
> and thankfully it even has tests. People's code is going to break.
>
> You are maintaining an API with many thousands of users. Don't break it. If
> you must, deprecate it. Introduce save-point, and add "You probably want to
> use save-point" to the docstring of save-excursion.