Re: Terminology in multi-tty primitives

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:28:59 -0500
> 
> > But there's no delete-tty or suspend-terminal.
> 
> That seems consistent to me.  The delete-terminal function does
> something useful on both text and graphical terminals: for ttys, it
> returns control of the tty to the shell; on X, it closes the X
> connection.  On the other hand, suspending only makes sense for
> text-only terminals: it is used to temporarily return control to the
> shell.  There is no analogous operation on graphical displays.  Thus, we
> provide suspend-tty rather than suspend-terminal.

I think you are wrong about suspend making no sense on GUI terminals:
we have (in Emacs 23) suspend-frame that does work on GUI.

Anyway, the examples I gave were just that: examples.  Here's another
example: we have make-frame-on-display, make-frame-on-tty, and
make-terminal-frame; and then we have make-frame that can do all of
the above.  IMO, it's terribly confusing.

But again, maybe I'm the only one who is confused.  My confusion is
exasperated by the fact that I cannot find any useful methodical way
to describe all these functions with partially overlapping
functionality in the ELisp manual.  Suggestions welcome...