Re: Confused by y-or-n-p

[martin rudalics]

> What was the reason for implementing this change in the
> single-character-answer commands?  Who actually wanted the change in
> behavior?  And for what use cases?

The old behavior was based on the assumption that the echo area and the
minibuffer contents are always shown in one and the same window (at
least wrt to one and the same frame).  This design has the basic flaw
that it will preclude forever showing echo area and minibuffer window in
separate areas of the screen: Otherwise, users would be asked
`yes-or-no-p' questions in one screen area, 'y-or-n-p' ones in another.

Now why would separating echo area and minibuffer window be desirable?
A main reason is that over the past years we started to show things in
the echo area that we didn't show there before, with the consequence
that prompts got more and more hidden by messages or some messages never
even made it to the echo area in the first place.  Ultimately, the time
sharing approach crashed under the load of messages.

So Eli started to visually separate the area where we prompt for user
input from the area where we show messages.  While this seems to work
for most of our more experienced users, less experienced ones (including
me) are now confused whenever they see a message that is completely
unrelated to the current interaction appear after the prompt.  We simply
have never in our life seen a program put notifications and user input
into one and the same screen line.

Finally, Juri made a first stab in unifying the 'yes-or-no-p' and
'y-or-n-p' behaviors by handling both via reading from the minibuffer.
This means that one can implement visual separation for these in the
same way, hopefully also in separate screen areas.

martin, with best wishes to father Edward