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Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.


From: Richard Stallman
Subject: Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 18:22:23 -0400

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > For me the main issue in source code's use of `...' is that
  > it's ambiguous.

It is ambiguous in some cases if parsed by a program.
No program needed to parse it until recent changes.

There are other easy ways to get rid of the ambiguity.
For instance, this

   To get out of the recursive edit, a command can throw to `exit' -- for
   instance `(throw 'exit nil)'.

can be written as

   To get out of the recursive edit, a command can throw to `exit':
      (throw 'exit nil)

or as

   To get out of the recursive edit, a command can throw to `exit'
   using `throw'.

I just looked at the main lisp directory and found no example
of a confusing doc string.  In lisp/emacs-lisp, the one
case in advice.el seems to be the only one.

Considering how few of these there are, ANY of these fixes would be an
easy solution.  Thus, it is better to fix them in local ways that
cause no trouble to anyone -- such as the two I've described above --
rather than make a global change.

That is especially true if the global change will cause some sort
of trouble.  I am not sure whether it will, but see my other message.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.




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