Re: comint.el: EMACS environment variable

[Stefan Monnier]

>     I believe it's important to distinguish term from comint: the reason why
>     external programs sometimes want to check is EMACS=t (or now 
> INSIDE_EMACS=t)
>     is because they need to adjust to the peculiar way comint interacts with
>     its inferior process: on the one side it's interactive, but on the other 
> it
>     sends whole commands at a time (the inferior process doesn't get to see
>     keystrokes).
>     OTOH term.el interacts with its inferior processes pretty much like xterm 
> or
>     any other terminal emulator would.

>     So I think setting EMACS to t in comint and to something different (namely
>     <version>) in term was no mistake.

> It is a good point that they should be different.  However, we want to
> stop setting EMACS in term for the same reason we do in comint.
> So we should set INSIDE_EMACS in both cases, but use different values.

> How about the Emacs version followed by either `(term NNN)'
> or `(comint NNN)'?  That way programs that want to distinguish
> can do so.

It's probably simpler to just do what we used to: set INSIDE_EMACS to t for
comint, and set it to the version number for term.


        Stefan