Re: Interactive hat.

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:59:58PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
>> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
>> > Now the question arises, if we've got the property
>> > `handle-shift-select', doesn't the "^" in the interactive string become
>> > redundant?
>
>> Not at all.  For the vast majority of uses -- functions distributed with
>> emacs (and in external packages that don't care about xemacs or older
>> versions of emacs), it's more convenient and prettier.
>
> It is, perhaps, more convenient, but prettier?  Well, let's just say
> that it is possible to take different viewpoints on this.  Mine is that
> it's an ugly hack, utterly different from anything that's gone before,
> and it will have negative implications, not all of which will be
> foreseen before the release of Emacs 23.  I think it's more "clever"
> than smart, a bit like C++'s abuse of the shift-left operator:
>
>     cout << (byte_count << 3) ;
>
> .  Somebody will end up having to code round it.  
>
> If it's possible to code everything we need with a symbol property, I
> think the interactive hat mechanism should be removed.
>
> There are currently only 28 defuns (in simple.el, lisp.el and
> paragraphs.el) which use this, so changing them to use a property
> instead would be a trivial amount of work.

You can't put a symbol property on an anonymous function, and quite a
few interactive functions are autogenerated within Emacs, particularly
in mouse keymaps.

-- 
David Kastrup