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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | bug#21391: 24.5; `thing-at-point' should return a string |
Date: | Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:19:00 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/50.0 |
On 10.11.2016 18:08, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
There's a tension here between consistency and backward compatibility. And since this function was "inconsistent" for a very long time, I'm not sure losing backward compatibility can be justified by consistency at this point.
I believe I've touched on this already. And another inconsistency: (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'number) always returns nil.
We'd also lose something else: some Lisp objects can be printed, but their printed representation cannot be read back. So for some objects, requiring thing-at-point to return a string would lose information.
We won't lose that if we go with either of my proposals: instead of printing objects inside the thing-at-point function, we would require that each returned thing is a string already. Any thing-at-point function that returns a non-string will be considered non-conformant.
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