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bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91
From: |
Noam Postavsky |
Subject: |
bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91 |
Date: |
Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:00:03 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.0.90 (gnu/linux) |
On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 10:53 AM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> An Emacs-Lisp file can contain pretty much anything,
> including lots of natural-language text. Are we now
> issuing warnings even for "smart quotes" in comments
> and strings?
Errors will be issued, but only for those occurring at the beginning of
a symbol. String and comment contents will remain unaffected.
>> it produces an obscure error message.
>>
>> The Emacs 25 error for the expression in question is
>> (wrong-number-of-arguments setq 31)
>
> Which tells you pretty much that setq is missing an
> argument or has too many, which makes you look at its
> arguments. Not so obscure. And accurate.
And yet, Alan said
This has wasted a lot of time identifying the problem, and
fruitlessly searching for a solution in the Emacs and Elisp manuals,
etc.
So maybe it's accurate in a narrow technical sense, but not in a
practically useful one.
> (setq ’bar 42)
> (setq foo ’bar)
>
> That's perfectly fine Lisp, even if it might not be
> what some might expect. But now, after your "fix",
> the first sexp raises an error - at read time, no less.
Yes, that code no longer works, you would have to write
(setq \’bar 42)
(setq foo \’bar)
I don't consider this a big loss. As far as I can see, this will just
make it harder to write obfuscated lisp code (although there will remain
plenty of other ways to obfuscate lisp code).
> And this still raises no error:
> (setq a’bar 42).
Yes, it would be more difficult implementation-wise to catch that case,
and it seems much less likely to come up in practice.
> Aside from the error/warning, such _escaping_ is another
> bad idea. It too subtracts from Lisp (while adding
> nonsense to it).
Nothing about escaping has changed.
> IMHO, this "fix" - all of its parts - should be reverted
[...]
> To be clear, though, I'm in favor of neither of those
[...]
> To be really clear, the fix proposed should be removed.
Thanks for trying to be clear, but repeating yourself like this just
makes your message longer, and therefore harder to comprehend.
I would really appreciate it if you would write shorter and more focused
messages, with less emotional rhetoric. Keep the "emotional
temperature" low (see https://freenode.net/changuide, which is about
IRC, but the same principles apply to email conversations).
>> Maybe everything in the "Unicode confusables" listing? Practically
>> speaking, I've never heard of problems with other characters, except
>> perhaps in programming "puzzles", obfuscated code contents and the like.
>
> There are lots of chars that can be confused, especially
> given the possibility of different fonts. I didn't even
> mention other variants of brackets (aka square brackets),
> braces (aka curly brackets), angle brackets, etc.
>
> Would you try to protect a user from the confusion of
> copy+pasting FULLWIDTH LEFT CURLY BRACKET FF5B{ in place
> of LEFT CURLY BRACKET 7B { in a doc string ("... \\{...}")
> or in a regexp? Or of using LEFT WHITE SQUARE BRACKET
> 301A 〚 in place of [ in a vector?
I don't plan to spend any effort towards that, no, although I wouldn't
necessarily be opposed to it.
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Alan Mackenzie, 2018/01/22
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/22
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Noam Postavsky, 2018/01/22
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/22
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Noam Postavsky, 2018/01/22
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Noam Postavsky, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91,
Noam Postavsky <=
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Drew Adams, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Noam Postavsky, 2018/01/23
- bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91, Noam Postavsky, 2018/01/28