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Re: evaluating numbers


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: evaluating numbers
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 08:52:06 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.0.50 (gnu/linux)

> No. I'm suggesting that the developer who wrote that code and that
> documentation is creating expectations by using the word "character" and
> thus could have implemented the function so that it returns a "character",
> or a "glyph" (which are synonymous) and not only its code point.

Emacs Lisp doesn't have a separate "character" data type (contrary to
XEmacs) and uses their integer code points for that instead.

As for glyphs, we do have some such notion, but it's different from
a character so wouldn't be appropriate here either.

>> For "discoverability" (or "cognitive gap reduction") purposes, I'd rather 
>> have something like
>> 1114111 (#o4177777, #x10ffff, t)

Maybe it would be helpful to you, but I don't think it will be helpful
in general.  The naive user will just wonder why there's a "t" in there
(I can already foresee the questions and discussions on gnu.emacs.help
and friends).  And in my experience it's extremely rare to have to
wonder "is this integer a valid char".  So adding a ", t" for this very
rare situation doesn't make much sense.


        Stefan




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