Re: Overlay-related TODO

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

> I believe that Stefan had something else in mind. As much as I understood
> he wanted to reuse the text property interval tree. I might have
> misunderstood something, but this would basically turn overlays into
> special text properties of sorts, and current overlay-related interface
> would be a bit harder to implement. Also, interval-handling code is all
> over textprop.c/interval.[ch]/buffer.c, and adding overlays on top of that
> does not sound all that reasonable to me.

> Again, I might have just misunderstood something.

> What do people here think about both approaches..?

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.  Obviously, I think
re-using the intervals tree will have more advantages and fewer
disadvantages, but I can't see any obvious reason why we'd reject
a patch which uses your approach.

BTW, regarding the issue of testing, the way I'd try to do it is by
keeping adding the new implementation without removing the old one, and
adding assertions that check the new code returns the same answers as
the old one.


        Stefan