emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Should undefined behavior be encouraged in Emacs?


From: Dave Abrahams
Subject: Re: Should undefined behavior be encouraged in Emacs?
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:15:23 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.110018 (No Gnus v0.18) Emacs/23.3 (darwin)

on Mon Oct 03 2011, Richard Stallman <rms-AT-gnu.org> wrote:

>     My impression is that Emacs built-ins are generally supposed to
>     have defined behavior, so that Emacs is easier to use reliably.
>
> What is the meaning of "defined" or "undefined", here?
> Is it a matter of whether the documentation says what happens in that case?
>
> In simple cases such as (goto-char -5), users tend to see what the
> behavior is, and are likely to write code that depends on it, even if
> it isn't documented.  Thus, leaving it undocumented doesn't mean that
> we can change it and nobody will notice.

If you make it a hard, inescapable error, that won't happen.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]