Re: syntax-after

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    It seems really gratuitous.  There are already 2 ways to represent the
    syntax info of a char: as a cons cell and as a string.  Both are documented
    in the elisp manual.

    The above change introduces yet a third representation, and an undocumented
    one at that.  Was that really necessary?

It is not new.  My change makes it compatible with char-syntax, which
is why I did it.  It is also more comparible with the way
modify-syntax-entry works, since the same character is used now by both.

This change reduces the number of representations of the syntax by
one, as far as I know.  Or is there some other function that uses the
old representation of syntax-after?  If so, perhaps it should be
changed too.

    I just saw that the above change caused Juri to install a fix to
    descr-text.el that replaces a call to syntax-after with a copy of its
    (previous) body.

That is strange, I searched for all the calls and only found them in
paren.el.