Re: find-file and backward-kill-word

[Richard Stallman]

    I don't want complex operations to merrily complete "successfully"
    after having done a number of incomplete steps.  Improving the error
    message is ok, but not at the cost of dropping the error.

I agree.

It was done this way on the idea that there's no harm in putting the
text in the kill ring before getting the error.  If people think that
is confusing, we could change it to get the error before altering the
kill ring when kill-read-only-ok is nil.

But this feature was introduced in 1994, so people are apparently
not complaining much.  Therefore let's leave it alone.