Re: frame-local variables weirdness

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On 10/17/07, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> > David Kastrup may have an informative opinion, since he found
> > XEmacs's glyph (~ Emacs image) API, uh, "annoying" (and even its
> > author admits it's probably excessively complex and detailed).  But
> > I'm not sure whether he objects to the idea of such an API, or
> > merely to XEmacs's implementation in glyphs.
>
> You should use quote marks only around things you actually quote.  I
> don't think I called them "annoying".

Sorry.  Quotation marks are generally used to mark variant usage of
text, actual quotes being only a special case.  Specifically, the `uh,
"annoying"' form is quite commonly used to imply "the actual words
he used are unrepeatable in polite company".

> specifiers in XEmacs.  But the main problem in my book with the open
> XEmacs data structures actually is that there is no reasonably
> complete and actually employed API for accessing them.  So one needs
> to acquire an understanding of the internal structure of them if one
> hopes to understand existing code, and mostly also for writing code of
> one's own.

Mostly one doesn't.  A buffer-local can be emulated by a specifier by using

(set-specifier buffer-local-variable local-value (current-buffer))

to modify it, and accessing the current buffer's value with

(specifier-instance buffer-local-variable)

I don't recall why the arcane incantation I recommended to you was
needed in your application.  It may be that some version of specifier-instance
would have been satisfactory but I didn't understand your need well enough
to give a more precise answer.

The situation is very similar to working with menus or Emacs-style
keymaps.  There are some conceptually simple tasks that the API
makes unnecessarily hard to do.