Re: Unbalanced change hooks (part 2) [Documentation fix still remaining]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Daniel.

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 11:55:41AM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:


> On August 30, 2016 11:47:49 AM PDT, Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> wrote:

> >Do you want to prevent future hackers from  using b-c-f and a-c-f
> >together the way we do?

> Yes, because the approach we use today is broken and there's little
> hope in fixing it.

There is software that cannot be written in any reasonable fashion
without the technique under discussion.  I suspect, even if I don't know
for sure, that CC Mode comes into that category.  Any lisp program which
requires full details of a change cannot be reasonably written without the
technique.

Documenting, falsely, that it doesn't work restricts the set of what can
be written for Emacs.

> The language in the documentation doesn't change what Emacs does. I
> don't understand what's so hard to see. You want to lead developers
> into writing code against an Emacs that doesn't exist.

No, I quite clearly and accurately described the Emacs that does exist:
The technique works almost always, but you have to detect and handle
exceptions carefully, something that can be easily done.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).