rms@GNU.AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) (05/29/91)
Please stop the flame war--it doesn't serve a useful purpose, and may discourage people from reading this group. There is no way that GNU Emacs could change much in its basic flavor. So, whether or not the design is a good one, there's no point in arguing about it here.
liberte@CS.UIUC.EDU (05/29/91)
Boys, boys, boys! Chill Out! A little healthy criticism of our beloved Emacs is good for us now and then. Regardless of how detailed a person's knowledge of a system is, they can contribute a viewpoint, if only a naive one. It so happens I, for one, agree that the Emacs user-interface is rather counter-intuitive in many cases. One quickly forgets that fact after one acquires the new intuition. But dredge up your first Emacs experiences if you can. In the case of quoting the quotes in regular expressions, "counter-intuitive" is an understatement (related to euphemism). Grossly obscure is more like it. (If I were to say it is "like a breath of fresh air", that would be an ironic, sarcastic metaphor.) Who amoung you has not struggled to get your quoted quotes right - either in Emacs or in csh or wherever they appear. I specifically added the following lines to the elisp manual section on regular expression notation to help matters: For example, the regular expression that matches the '\' character is '\\'. To write a Lisp string that contains '\\', Lisp syntax requires you to quote each '\' with another '\'. Therefore, the read syntax for this string is "\\\\". I dont think this multiple translation has anything to do with functional languages either. BTW, if you want Emacs to do some of the quoting for you, you might be able to use the regexp-quote function. Dan LaLiberte (Co-editor of the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual) uiucdcs!liberte liberte@cs.uiuc.edu liberte%a.cs.uiuc.edu@uiucvmd.bitnet