Re: A subtle question about naming

[David Z Maze]

"jronald" <followait@163.com> writes:

> Why use auto-mode-alist, but not auto-mode-list? 

Probably because it's an alist, not just a list: each item in the list
is a cons cell whose car is the value to match against and whose cdr
is the actual value.  You might see info://elisp/Association+Lists for
more details.  The key implication of this is that I can use something
like (cdr (assoc "\\.c\\'" auto-mode-alist)) to find out what mode
processes C source files; more likely, I'd use the more involved
assoc-default function.

This isn't particularly specific to Gnus (the Emacs news/mail reader),
though M-x apropos gnus.*alist finds many things; it might better
belong on gnu.emacs.help.

  --dzm