Subject: bug#21391: 24.5; `thing-at-point' should return a string

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2016 20:49:44 +0200

> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2016 19:28:17 +0200
> 
> On 10.11.2016 19:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > But that's exactly my point: you cannot usefully return some objects
> > as strings.  Their text representation is much less useful than the
> > object itself.
> 
> If the consumer needs the text representation, they will call
> 
> (thing-at-point 'foo)
> 
> If they need the "real thing", they will call
> 
> (foo-at-point)
> 
> which we really expect to be defined.

Which is again entirely backward incompatible, right?

Sorry, this doesn't sound safe to me.