From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
Cc: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 21:55:51 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <jwvvdnkn0mg.fsf-monnier+emacs@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090528230359.GA1474@muc.de> (Alan Mackenzie's message of "Thu, 28 May 2009 23:03:59 +0000")
> Hmmm. No you haven't. You have noted one of the circumstances in which
> a mark becomes active, yet haven't said what it is for a mark to BE
> active. It is as though a young child has asked you what "pregnant"
> means, and the entire gist of your answer is "a woman becomes pregnant
> after a kissing and cuddling session". Unless you mention the growing
> foetus, your answer is evasive and unhelpful, in fact not really an
> answer at all. What, exactly, is the essence of "active"ness, in the
> same way that the foetus is the essence of pregnancy?
The problkem is that the activeness of the mark doesn't describe some
property of some other state. It's a state itself. In your analogy,
there's no foetus that would allow us to determine whether the mark
is active. All we have is the `mark-active' variable, so in the end all
we can say is "the mark is active if the mark is active".
> I think the answer has got to be along the following lines: "The region
> is called @dfn{active} when Emacs marks it internally as the portion of
> buffer which any of a certain set of commands is to work on, when
> otherwise the command would use the whole buffer, or a single word, or
> some other portion of buffer. When the region is active, the mark is
> also said to be @dfn{active}." - essentially the (iii) from my previous
> email. Sorry for the poor wording - it's late and I'm tired.
I would find this fairly confusing, giving the impression that Emacs
magically sometimes marks the region in some way outside of the
user's control.
> Surely, it is better to regard the mark and region as being inactive
> when t-m-m is disabled?
That's a delicate question, because mark-active sadly disagrees
with you. Basically, I'd agree, but the code needs to be changed to
reflect that (by basically introducing a notion of "existing mark" as
distinct from "mark active").
Stefan
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-05-29 1:55 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-05-28 12:29 Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 16:54 ` Chong Yidong
2009-05-28 20:15 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 20:48 ` Chong Yidong
2009-05-28 23:03 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 23:53 ` Davis Herring
2009-05-29 11:01 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 0:21 ` Chong Yidong
2009-05-29 1:55 ` Stefan Monnier [this message]
2009-05-29 4:30 ` Kevin Rodgers
2009-05-29 5:47 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-05-29 8:25 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 8:58 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-06-01 2:34 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-06-01 9:40 ` Lennart Borgman
2009-06-02 6:23 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-06-02 11:50 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 8:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 9:27 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 10:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 13:13 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 14:19 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-05-29 16:40 ` Drew Adams
2009-05-29 22:20 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-30 0:11 ` Drew Adams
2009-05-29 9:55 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 10:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-06-01 2:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 10:45 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-05-29 8:38 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 9:35 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 9:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 13:17 ` Alan Mackenzie
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