minibuffer-prompt-end badly named

[Thomas A. Horsley]

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In GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i386-msvc-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2002-03-19 on buffy
configured using `configure --with-msvc (12.00)'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: ENU
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: nil

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

While attempting to port all my custom lisp code that navigates around
buffers so it works correctly in the minibuffer, I started using things
like (minibuffer-prompt-end) instead of (point-min). This worked
until I tried using some of these functions in shell buffers.

The function minibuffer-prompt-end (and all the other related functions
added for emacs21) are very badly documented. Just looking at prompt-end:

(defun minibuffer-prompt-end ()
  "Return the buffer position of the end of the minibuffer prompt.
Return (point-min) if current buffer is not a mini-buffer."
  (field-beginning (point-max)))

It *claims* to work one way in the minibuffer and another way in all other
buffers, but in reality, all it does is work one way for buffers with
text fields and another way for buffers without text fields. Since
lots of buffers use text fields (comint, to pick a popular one), this
will have strange and wondrous behavior if you write code while
believing the documentation.

In fact, it would really be useful to have functions that work the
way minibuffer-prompt-end and friends are documented to work, but
unfortunately, they don't work that way :-(.

Speaking of which, how the devil do you tell if the current buffer
is a minibuffer?

Recent input:
<help-echo> <help-echo> c y SPC c y SPC c y SPC c y 
SPC c y SPC c y SPC c y SPC c y SPC c y SPC c y SPC 
<down> SPC <down> <down> <down> <down> SPC <down> SPC 
c y SPC c y C-u 9 9 c y q y <f1> r e p o r t - b u 
g <tab> <f1> a p r o p o s <return> r e p o r t . * 
b u g <return> <f1> r e p o r t - e m a c <tab> <r
eturn>

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