Re: Lisp primitives and their calling of the change hooks

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Stefan.

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 16:36:42 -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >> which is lax enough that any behavior could be argued to be acceptable.
> >> IOW I think it's too lax.  We should probably try and fix it to reflect
> >> the fact that every change should be covered by the last preceding b-c-f
> >> and should be followed by a corresponding call to a-c-f (and this
> >> before the next call to b-c-f).
> > Is that quite right?

> Probably not quite.

> > The upcase-region call in my test had no a-c-f call, almost certainly
> > because there were no lower case letters in the buffer at the time.

> Indeed, there were no changes, so no need to call a-c-f.

> > From your answers in this thread, I'm thinking that every
> > primitive-call which could change the buffer will have exactly one
> > b-c-f and zero or more a-c-f's.

> Sounds about right, tho I expect some primitives might just call insert
> and delete a few times, thus calling b-c-f several times.

> > How about something like this to replace that paragraph from the elisp
> > manual?

> >     The primitives which atomically insert or delete a contiguous chunk
> >     of text into or from a buffer will call `before-change-functions'
> >     and `after-change-functions' in balanced pairs, once for each
> >     change.  The arguments to these hooks will exactly delimit the
> >     change being made.  Calls to these primitives comprise the vast bulk
> >     of buffer changes.

> >     Other, more complex primitives aim to call `before-change-functions'
> >     once before making any changes, then to call
> >     `after-change-functions' zero, one, or several times, depending on
> >     how many individual changes the primitive makes.  The `BEG' and
> >     `END' arguments to `before-change-functions' will enclose a region
> >     in which the individual changes are made, but won't necessarily be
> >     the minimal such region.  The `BEG', `END', and `OLD-LEN' arguments
> >     to each successive call of `after-change-functions' will accurately
> >     delimit the current change.

> Looks good to me, thank you.

I've found a discrepancy.  Just one.  In (transpose-regions 1 10 11 20),
the hook calls are, in order, ((1 10) (11 20) (1 20 19)).  The two
consecutive b-c-f's happen when the two regions are of equal size and
non-contiguous.

The cause of this is not hard to find: in Ftranspose_region, editfns.c
L5204, there are two calls to modify_text on consecutive lines.  This
seems to be some sort of optimisation.  It is not done elsewhere in
Ftranspose_region.  I dare say this could be fixed easily.

> I think in the case of subst-chars-in-region we only call a-c-f one time
> (but with tighter bounds than those of the preceding b-c-f) rather than
> once per character that's substituted, so maybe "The `BEG', `END', and
> `OLD-LEN' arguments to each successive call of `after-change-functions'
> will accurately delimit the current change" promises a bit more than we
> deliver, although it depends on how we interpret "current change".

> In any case, the above is much better than what we have now and I think
> it gives a pretty good rendition of our intention.

Perhaps for Emacs-27, if we want to fix transpose-regions.

>         Stefan

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).