Re: thing-at-point's meaning of current sexp vs. up-list's: which is correct?

[Stephen Berman]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:40:58 -0700 (PDT) Kelly Dean <address@hidden> wrote:

> Davis Herring wrote:
>>Point isn't on a character, but between them; the box cursor is drawn on
>>the character following point. Therefore when the cursor is on a ),
>>point is definitely inside the parentheses.
>
> I switched to Emacs almost six months ago; I'm surprised I missed something
> this basic until now.
> The docstring for (point) says "Beginning of buffer is position (point-min)",
> so point is at, not between, "positions".
> If there's one character in a buffer, then point can be at position 1 or
> 2. Which position is the character at? Or are characters not at positions, but
> _between_ positions? That seems weird. I always thought both point and
> characters were at positions.

See (elisp)Positions:

   A "position" is the index of a character in the text of a buffer.  More
   precisely, a position identifies the place between two characters (or
   before the first character, or after the last character), so we can
   speak of the character before or after a given position.  However, we
   often speak of the character "at" a position, meaning the character
   after that position.

Steve Berman