Re: Lisp primitives and their calling of the change hooks

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Can you describe a practical situation where an Elisp coder could use
> the new text to some practical benefit, i.e. to change her
> implementation to be better/more resilient (as opposed to just
> enhancing her understanding of this stuff)?  I guess I don't see how
> such practical benefits would be possible with the new text.

In CC-mode, Alan wants to store information about the state of the
buffer before a change and then use this info after the change (IIUC
this is mostly to try and avoid recomputing parsing info about the rest
of the buffer).  With the current description, all he can say is "in
practice my hack works 99% of the time, and the doc says that
I basically can't bring it to 100%".  With the new description, it
should be possible for him to bring it to 100% (as you know I think he'd
be better off using an approach like that of syntax-ppss, but that
doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it possible to do it reliably his
way).


        Stefan