Re: symbol-at-point

[Stefan Monnier]

> Wouldn't it be more clean to write a separate (intern
> SYMBOL-at-point) function, if someone wants to do that?

I agree that symbol-at-point should return a string.
When I fixed symbol-at-point to work in non-elisp major modes, I preserved
this part of the behavior for no good reason.

But returning a symbol has the main disadvantage that you can't distinguish
the case where point is not on a symbol (w.g. it's looking at a semi-colon)
from the case where it's looking at the symbol "nil".


        Stefan