Re: display.texi: (<line>,<col>) isn't documented.

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 6/7/07, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:

> Some people have said that it is obvious that line comes before column. I
> don't see why that's obvious

As Lennart and others have explained, because it is customary to refer
first to more important things, and lines are more fundamental when
dealing with an Emacs buffer than columns. It is a bigger movement to
advance a line than a column. line-number-mode is enabled by default,
column-number-mode is not.

> 12:25 can be confused with a time. 12-25 can be confused with a range of
> some kind (12 through 25). 12.25 can be confused with a decimal number.

12/25 can be confused with? A rational number? :)

> Uppercase letters such as L and C are hard to separate visually from the
> digits. Using l and c risks confusion between l and 1.

Use "r" (for rows) and "c". 25r32c is still horrible, though.

> In a buffer, horizontal and vertical positions
> can only mean lines and columns, however (unless one is thinking pixels).

That is true, but it doesn't mean that going from x,y to row,column
(or column,row :) is intuitive at all.

> It's true that y suggests increasing values toward the top, but practice
> would soon put the lie to that association.

That's true for every format described in this tread, even the "Ln vs.
Cn vs. (l,c)" style that we have now.

> but I can live with any of the
> proposals, including what we have now.

Same here. I won't be using it anyway.

            Juanma