Re: Technically correct or conceptually easier?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

    > Non-nil means disregard read-only status of buffers or characters.

It follows that nil means don't disregard that.

In general, if

    > Non-nil means do X

then nil means do things the usual way, and t means do X instead of
the usual way.

This practice makes hundreds of doc strings more succinct.  I don't
think that making them longer would be an improvement.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)