Re: char properties vs char properties: two different meanings

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 10:18:42 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Drew Adams <address@hidden>
> 
> Not sure what a good solution might be, but we have a terminology problem:
> there are two completely different notions of "character property" used
> in Emacs Lisp:
> 
> 1. A character property is either a text property or an overlay property.
>    It is what function `get-char-property' returns.  It is good to have
>    a term that covers both.  I use it in doc for functions I have that
>    act on either, for instance.
> 
> 2. A character property is a named attribute of a character...
>    See (elisp) `Character Properties'.

No, we have only 1 "character property": the second one you mention.
The first one lives in function names and is called "char-property".
This is unfortunate (and has bad mnemonic value, IMO), but that's
water under the bridge, because these APIs existed long before Emacs
started supporting Unicode.

> Is "character code property" accurate?

No.  There's no property to the "code" of the character.  The addition
of "code" was a kludge, to work around the fact that char-property was
already taken.

But please don't confuse API names and terminology.  They don't need
to be 100% the same.  It's good if they are, but it's not a
catastrophe if they aren't.

Just stop talking about character properties in the first sense in
human-readable text, such as doc strings.  The manual doesn't use
"char property" anywhere.