syntax-after

[Stefan Monnier]

What was the reason for the following change?

2004-11-06  Richard M. Stallman  <address@hidden>

        * subr.el (syntax-after): Return the syntax letter, not the raw code.

It seems really gratuitous.  There are already 2 ways to represent the
syntax info of a char: as a cons cell and as a string.  Both are documented
in the elisp manual.

The above change introduces yet a third representation, and an undocumented
one at that.  Was that really necessary?

I just saw that the above change caused Juri to install a fix to
descr-text.el that replaces a call to syntax-after with a copy of its
(previous) body.  I think this is moving backward, not forward.


        Stefan