Subject: bug#24925: 25.1.50; Suboptimal explanation of FACESPEC in (elisp) Search-based Fontification

From: Michael Heerdegen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 17:20:38 +0100

Hi,

Gotten attentive by a question in emacs-help, I want to suggest to
improve this paragraph:

     In this kind of element, FACESPEC is an expression whose value
     specifies the face to use for highlighting.  In the simplest case,
     FACESPEC is a Lisp variable (a symbol) whose value is a face name.

The first sentence is not good because an expression has no associated
value.  Reading that sentence, the reader might get the false impression
that the expression must be constant or a constant (always evaluate to
the same value).  While this interpretation is not suggesting to the
advanced reader, I think lots of Lisp newbies will rely on this part of
the documentation, and it's already confusing that faces use a separate
name space, but like variables are specified as symbols, so we should
try to be non-ambiguous.

The second sentence is also confusing: I think the simplest case is
actually a face name specified directly, i.e. a quoted symbol.  We can
mention these both cases in one sentence of cause.

Thanks,

Michael.

In GNU Emacs 25.1.50.8 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.2)
 of 2016-11-10 built on drachen
Repository revision: 78aece497ce9dc784d5e3d2707d76766eed2a174
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11804000
System Description:	Debian GNU/Linux testing (stretch)

Configured features:
XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND DBUS GSETTINGS NOTIFY
LIBXML2 FREETYPE XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: de_DE.utf8
  value of $LC_COLLATE: C
  value of $LC_TIME: C
  value of $LANG: de_DE.utf8
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix