Re: find-file-noselect needs save-match-data

[Herbert Euler]

> So I don't see current usage as problematic w.r.t efficiency.
> The only real problem with it is that people tend to not know/understand it
> and are thus tempted to complain that most functions need to be wrapped in
> save-match-data, which then leads to long discussions such as this one.
> Maybe we should make the convention more prominent by adding it to the
> docstring of save-match-data?

This is probably true.  I found this strange behavior when I studied
the previous SKIP_SYNTAX_BACKWARD patch.  I grep'ed to get all the
places that invoke SKIP_SYNTAX_BACKWARD, and looked at them one by
one.  Several are in regex.c.  I wrote many expressions in the
*scratch* buffer and evaluated them with C-x C-e sequentially to make
sure all the places in regex.c get called.  When I evaluated the three
expressions in the beginning of this thread, I got wrong results and
started not to understand it.  Starting Emacs with -Q, I found the
result is correct.  So I knew it's something wrong with my
configuration.  Finally, I knew it's in type-break, and then I knew
the problem is caused by `find-file-noselect' which is put on
`post-command-hook' and changes the match data.

I missed something, at least the efficiency.  And the operations above
is truely rare: I don't think people would do that often too.  If in
most cases such a wrong result will not happen, it is then not a
problem for common usage.  Unless some mode makes the wrong cases
common, it is safe to ignore it.

However, this is surely a shortcoming of Emacs.

Regards,
Guanpeng Xu

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