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Applying intern-soft to a symbol
From: |
N. Raghavendra |
Subject: |
Applying intern-soft to a symbol |
Date: |
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 20:37:35 +0530 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
I am confused about the following Emacs Lisp interaction, where I've
numbered the prompts for ease of reference.
*** Welcome to IELM *** Type (describe-mode) for help.
ELISP1> (intern-soft "quux")
nil
ELISP2> (intern-soft 'quux)
quux
ELISP3> (intern-soft "quux")
quux
ELISP4>
As I understand, the value of ELISP1 indicates that `quux' is not an
interned symbol in the default obarray. The value of ELISP2 indicates
that `quux' is now an interned symbol in the default obarray, and the
value of ELISP3 confirms this.
Now, the Emacs Lisp manual says the following about intern-soft:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Function: intern-soft name &optional obarray
This function returns the symbol in OBARRAY whose name is NAME, or
‘nil’ if OBARRAY has no symbol with that name. Therefore, you can
use ‘intern-soft’ to test whether a symbol with a given name is
already interned. If OBARRAY is omitted, the value of the global
variable ‘obarray’ is used.
The argument NAME may also be a symbol; in that case, the function
returns NAME if NAME is interned in the specified obarray, and
otherwise ‘nil’.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
According to the second paragraph of this description, ELISP2 should
have returned nil, because the symbol `quux' was then not interned in
the default obarray. Can someone please explain why ELISP2 returns
`quux' instead of nil?
Raghu.
--
N. Raghavendra <raghu@hri.res.in>, http://www.retrotexts.net/
Harish-Chandra Research Institute, http://www.hri.res.in/
- Applying intern-soft to a symbol,
N. Raghavendra <=