Re: Should mode commands be idempotent?

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

> Good luck with such a guideline. The state of an Emacs session is _never_
> exactly the same after each time you turn on a mode - any mode, any session.
> So many things change...

I think we can reduce the scope of what we're saying:

The statement I made only applies if the command is called in immediate
succession. That is, the function is *itself* idempotent; it doesn't guarantee
that intervening effects are somehow negated.

That is, the following should be functionally equivalent:

    (foo-mode 1)
    (progn (foo-mode 1) (foo-mode 1))

I don't see what great difficulty this poses. If a mode author is doing thing
inside `foo-mode' like changing the system or the disk, that's exactly the
sort of thing our guideline seeks to prevent.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2