bug#40213: what-cursor-position could tell the meaning of marks too!

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Here's a way that is trivially easy to implement, and won't be slow.
> Invent a new text property: 'significance'.  If the character
> has that property, its value should be a string which explains
> what the character "means" in that particular case.
>
> If a mode puts some sort of special marker in a buffer, it can
> put that text property on it.

But that would be slow.  The use case here is all the different
characters used as markers in a Gnus Summary buffer -- and there may be
tens of thousands of them.  Making generation of these buffers (which is
already slow) even slower, just to make it possible to these characters
for their meaning, would be a disservice to the users.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no