Re: kill ring menu

[Richard Stallman]

    BTW, why not make M-y do something reasonable if invoked without a
    preceeding C-y?  I've always thought it would be handy if it would do
    the equivalent of `C-w C-y M-y' in that situation -- i.e., replace the
    current region with the first thing in the kill ring (and then you
    could type further `M-y's to continue down the ring).

This would be extremely annoying if you were not recently doing yanking.
There is always a region, after all.  Some unpredictable amount of text,
perhaps large, would be replaced.  If you did not notice, the results
would be really bad.