Re: emacs 22 - regular-expression isearch on spaces extremely lenient

[dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs)]

Emacs has been such a well incrementally-designed system (what,
35, 40 years?) that it's been a real pleasure to use.

What DWIM there has been of the type that when you discover
a piece, in your ordinary use of emacs, that your (well,
mine, anyway) reaction is NOT of the type:

 1:  God damn to hell -- WHY did those idiots make it do that!

, but rather of the type:

 2:  Incredible -- this thing has not only a doctor built in to
      it, but a world-class *mind-reader* as well!

Never once have I been confronted with some surprising behaviour
that I haven't felt that it was exactly what I wanted it to do.

------

This space-->whitespaces thing seems very, very different; I haven't
seen in this thread *anyone* who'd give a type-2 (above) opinion
about this "feature", nor can I even *imagine* any normal emacs-user
who would.

So how did this thing get included?

Are we all subject to whatever whim that occurs to the devel-people?

Does (gnu)=Emacs *belong* to just them -- such that whatever
*they* vote for becomes "law"?

How many thousands, or tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people
daily use emacs, in fact *rely* on emacs for 
their most important work?

Now, maybe it's infeasible to try to get a vote from that world-user-base;
but heck, aren't there a lot of people who read this newsgroup
at least once a week?

Why not set up a vote among all of *us* (yes, include the devel-people
too)?

Come up with a description of this "feature" that's acceptable
to both sides on this issue, and set up some kind of a computer-based
vote.

(To help avoidng vote-fraud, we could limit it to those who have
posted within, say, the last year or two -- and we'd suspect
funny-tricks if any voter appeared twice.)

-----

We really have to have some final hurdle that any controversial
feature must pass before it gets included -- *especially*
when it's not being defaulted "off".

I've been using emacs for *so* long (since 1980 with twenex-emacs,
rms on gnu jumping over the moon), even if not so expertly,
that this (by now) old dog's paws have a really hard time
switching now hard-wired habits and expectations.

Seems like as good a time as any to set up a better
procedure for (thus far) few "controversial" changes.

Just my two bits -- but I hope I'm not the only one
who feels like I do.


David