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

[Davis Herring]

>>   Some commands, which ordinarily operate on the region when the mark is
>>   active, instead act on the entire buffer.
>
> That is a definition of "active", surely, as I suggested above.  Surely,
> it is better to regard the mark and region as being inactive when t-m-m
> is disabled?

It seems to me that there are two kinds of activeness of the mark (and the
region; they have between them only one state).  The first kind (call it
active1) is associated with commands like `kill-region', which refuse to
do anything unless the region is active1.  Outside of transient mark mode,
the mark is always active1 if it exists at all; with tmm, the mark is
frequently activated1 and deactivated1.

The other kind (active2) is associated with commands like `undo',
`insert-parentheses', and `how-many', which restrict, extend, or change
(respectively) their area of effect to be the region iff it is active2. 
Outside of transient mark mode, the mark is never active2 at all; with
tmm, the mark is active2 iff it is active1.

So we see that while there are two predicates, they can be resolved as (or
(not transient-mark-mode) (mark-active)) and (and transient-mark-mode
(mark-active)).  Since my imaginary function `mark-active' is only ever
called when tmm is on, we may take it to return nil otherwise and replace
active2 with just (mark-active).  There is then only one variable
"active", but tmm has different effects on different interpretations of
its value.

Sidebar: I like the 22 feature of turning tmm on temporarily; I don't like
it in general (partly because I like the mark being active1), but
otherwise I cannot have an active2 mark at all.

Davis

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