bug#40697: 25.3; sort-lines not accepting reverse parameter

[Roland Hughes]

On 4/18/20 2:27 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Roland Hughes <roland@logikalsolutions.com>
> > Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 13:45:17 -0500
> > Cc: 40697@debbugs.gnu.org
> >
> > Okay, I was not descriptive enough.
> >
> > In interactive mode you cannot enter the argument but according to the
> > documentation I should be able to. To enter an argument I would have to
> > be able to use the space bar after entering sort-lines. When I try using
> > the spacebar I get [SoleCompletion] and no space. Cannot enter argument.
> I modified the doc string to say this instead:
>
>    Sort lines in region alphabetically; REVERSE non-nil means descending order.
>    Interactively, REVERSE is the prefix argument, and BEG and END are the 
> region.
>    Called from a program, there are three arguments:
>    REVERSE (non-nil means reverse order), BEG and END (region to sort).
>    The variable ‘sort-fold-case’ determines whether alphabetic case affects
>    the sort order.
>
> Does this modified doc string resolve the issue you had?

No, the wiki page does.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sorting

The wording in the help text is rather expert friendly. A user coming in 
cold to Emacs is going to interpret "prefix argument" as

[GOLD]-7 REVERSE sort-lines [RETURN]

I've been getting back into Emacs because I was getting back into COBOL 
and working with GNUCOBOL. Emacs is currently as close to an IDE as 
their is until one of the 3.x versions of GNUCOBOL is officially 
released. It will work with a few more then. EDT on GUI Emacs makes the 
editor vastly more accessible to anyone who has used EDT, LSE, JED (with 
EDT keypad enabled) and others than mirror the EDT keypad.

Of course, any time I have to deep dive to get into something I tend to 
write a book about it.

https://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html

The GUI Emacs book focusing on using EDT keypad is almost complete. Sort 
was the last topic before creating cover art, tagging indexes, and 
sending off for first round edit.

--
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net
http://www.johnsmith-book.com
http://www.logikalblog.com
http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog