Subject: Re: bug#25461: Missing doc strings for "," and ",@".

From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:56:27 +0000

Hello, Glenn.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > With any existing Emacs, when I do

> >     C-h f , <CR>

> > or

> >     C-h f ,@ <CR>

> > , I get the response

> >     [No match]

> But they aren't functions, so I don't see why you want describe-function
> to report on them, or indeed how that would work.

I think I want some means of displaying "their doc strings".  They're much
more like functions than variables, so for lack of any third option, C-h
f seems the best way of doing this display.

I've hacked out a solution for this, involving defining defuns to hold
the doc strings.  I hope to post this patch on bug-gnu-emacs later on
this evening (European time).

> With this and 25462, it seems to me that what you want is a
> (context-sensitive?) type of help that does not exist yet, which would
> report on special syntax used within macros and such.

No, nothing so general.  pcase has introduced a lot of confusion (for me,
at any rate, so probably also for a lot of hackers who aren't Emacs
contributors), so I would like the doc strings to reduce this confusion
as far is as reasonable.

> (Both , and ,@ are indexed in the elisp manual, BTW.)

That's as it should be.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).