Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Yidong!

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 12:54:15PM -0400, Chong Yidong wrote:
> Thanks; I've made some changes to the text to address these concerns.
> Please take another look.

;-).

The essence of my unhappiness is that "active" isn't defined.  You've
put in a formal @dfn{active}, but weaselled out of actually defining it.
You state what happens _when_ the mark is "active", but not what a mark
has to do or to be to acquire or to lose the essence of "active"ness.

You also haven't defined what a region has to do, be, or become, to be
"active".  The phrase "when the region is active" occurs several times
in the rest of the manual.  For the rest of this email, I'm going to
presume that the region is "active" exactly whenever the mark is.

If the term "active" cannot be defined, it should be purged from the
manual and the software, being replaced by terms we can define.  Surely?

As I see it, an "active" region has three attributes:
(i) C-w kills it;
(ii) It's highlit;
(iii) M-$ checks the spelling of EACH WORD IN THE REGION (as opposed to
  just the one surrounding point).

Now, which of these (or which combination of them) constitutes
"active"ness?

(i)? I guess it originally was, but due to the default setting of
  `mark-even-if-inactive', all regions are now active(i) all the time,
  rendering the entire description redundant and confusing.

(ii)? "Active" is a strange way of writing "highlit", but if this is the
  meaning, then when transient-mark-mode is nil (as described in
  "Persistent Mark"), the mark is NEVER active(ii).

(iii)? This cannot be.  The semantic chasm between "check the spelling
  of lots of words, not just one" and the dictionary meaning of "active"
  is just too vast.  Anyhow, with null t-m-m, the mark is NEVER
  active(iii).

########################################################################

In *scratch*, disable Transient Mark Mode, write the following line and
put the region as indicated:

    one two threeee
         ^         ^
         |         |
       point     mark

The mark is now active (since t-m-m is nil).  Therefore the region is
"active".  Execute the command `ispell-word' with M-$; this is a command
which supposedly works on the region when the region is "active".  It
fails to flag the non-word "threeee", suggesting that it regards the
region as "inactive".  Energise transient transient-mark-mode with C-u
C-x C-x, and repeat M-$.  It now flags "threeee", as it should have done
before.

#########################################################################

I assert that the use of "active" in pages "Mark" and "Persistent Mark"
and most of the rest of the book, renders them incoherent and
meaningless, and that the only way to restore coherence is to get rid of
"active".

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).