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Re: Doc of deprecated INITIAL-INPUT arg of completing-read


From: Jean Louis
Subject: Re: Doc of deprecated INITIAL-INPUT arg of completing-read
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2022 01:00:04 +0300
User-agent: Mutt/+ () (2022-05-21)

* Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> [2022-06-29 00:33]:
> > For anything there must be reason. What is reason to "strongly warn"
> > programmer not to use it?
> 
> Because there's a lot of past experience where people want to have the
> Windows-style behavior where prompts get prefilled with the (selected)
> default, and they don't understand that in order to get that they need
> to change `completing-read`.  So instead they abuse `initial-content` in
> their code (even though it doesn't give quite the same behavior either
> but gets the closer).

That would hypothetically mean that for one smaller group of users
using Windows-style behavior every programmer has to be "strongly
warned".

Your explanation above is also not part of docstring and I do not say
it is necessary to be, but when you think there are such reasons than
maybe better is to solve how that understanding will arrive to
users. Understanding will arrive with good communication in the
docstring.

Instead of strongly warning against useful function it is better to
strongly make distinction in the description what that initial input
means as distinguished to the default value.

-- 
Jean

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