Re: electric-indent-mode: abolition of `newline' function is not the Right Thing.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stefan Monnier writes:
 > > With respect, that is not the topic of this thread.  That topic is that
 > > with electric-indent-mode enabled, there is now no command, also no
 > > elisp function which has the traditional functionality of `newline'.
 > 
 > Quick, without looking at the source code of newline: what does
 > `newline' do that (insert "\n") or C-q C-j doesn't do?

    `newline' is an interactive built-in compiled Lisp function
      -- loaded from "/playpen/src/XEmacs/xemacs/lisp/simple.elc"
    (newline &optional N)

    Documentation:
    Insert a newline, and move to left margin of the new line if it's blank.
    The newline is marked with the text-property `hard'.
    With optional arg N, insert that many newlines.
    In Auto Fill mode, if no numeric arg, break the preceding line if it's
    long.

Look ma, no code browsing!  (N.B. The Emacs docstring is worded
differently but it says the same thing, modulo being more accurate
about `use-hard-newlines' and auto-fill-mode.)