Re: buffer-substring vs. buffer-substring-no-properties

[Stefan Monnier]

>> How is it ``freaking out'' your code, exactly?  Can you show an
>> example of such breakage?  Perhaps there's a way to do what you want
>> without switching to buffer-substring-no-properties.  AFAIK, the Emacs
>> primitives generally DTRT even though properties are there.

> Huh?  I have a program built in elisp (13,000+ lines) that freaks out
> when it doesn't see a string when it expects it.  This program is used

Yes, your program doesn't like it and is out in the field.
Emacs is also out in the field, so it's not like your complaint is going
to fix the problem magically.

> by many people and is already "in the field".  When they upgrade to
> emacs 21, they will be contacting me, because the program doesn't work
> on emacs 21.

The buffer-substring function has not been changed in Emacs-21.
It already behaved that way in Emacs-20 (and probably Emacs-19 as well).

>  I can certainly fix the problem, but I do not see the
> reason for such an incompatible change.  Any software that was not
> packaged with emacs 21, and was thus fixed before release, is at risk
> for being broken by an emacs 21 upgrade.  Right?  Doesn't this bother
> anyone but me?

There incompatibilities, but the buffer-substring is not one of them.
So could you answer Eli's question and show us what you mean by
"freaks out", ideally with an easily reproducible test case, or
at least with a backtrace (using debug-on-error).


        Stefan