Re: table.el

[Richard Stallman]

It seems that the wrapper mechanism has a lot of advantages
over using advice.  I knew it had some advantages, but you
have discovered others.

But there is still the question of whether table.el needs either of
the two mechanisms, or whether some other existing mechanism will
do the job.

      Otherwise, the current buffer is temporarily switched to
    the cell cache buffer and the beg and end are translated from the
    original buffer's locations to the cache buffer's corresponding
    locations.  Then the original `kill-region' is invoked in the cache
    buffer.

Could you get the same job by running kill-region in the user's
buffer, seeing what part was killed, and then operating similarly on
the cache buffer?  Maybe you could do this with
after-change-functions.

      When it is done the pre-processing kicks in and the content
    of the cache buffer is reformatted by filling paragraphs and the
    current buffer is restored.

What mechanism do you use to invoke this pre-processing?

      At the end a timer is set so that the new
    cache content is reflected to the original buffer eventually.

I am not sure I understand this.  Do you mean that the timer copies
updated data from the cache into the user's buffer?

If so, it does not sound good to let that happen on a timer.  Would it
be better to do that in the after-change-functions?  Or in
post-command-hook?  Using post-command-hook would be much like using a
timer except that there would be no delay.