Re: Scratch buffer annoyance

[Davis Herring]

Davis: Why do you think we have text properties? ...
David: It is good to see a solution that is not confusing to beginners.

Miles:
> I'm not sure which one you think is confusing to beginners, but I think
> the text property solution would be far more confusing.
>
> I mean really, something like (buffer "foo") or (file "~/bar")
> seems pretty clear, even if you don't know what lisp is.
>
> Text properties, on the other hand are _invisible_, and having strings
> whose meaning differs based on invisible properties doesn't seems like a
> very good interface at all for beginners... (or experts for that matter)

In case I wasn't obvious enough, I was joking.  And from the shortness of
his reply, I am sure that David was joking too.  Text properties are more
than inappropriate here because they are attached to the characters and
not to the string: three different substrings could all be marked, say,
'buffer!

Davis

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