Subject: bug#30073: 27.0.50; dired-do-delete ignores customization for short answers

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 19:56:47 +0200

> From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2018 01:02:27 +0200
> 
> > Why limit this to Dired?  People who use fset to get y-or-n-p want
> > that everywhere, right?
> 
> Right, this is not specific to Dired.  So we could add a new
> customizable variable, and easily change ‘yes-or-no-p’ to call
> ‘y-or-n-p’ if it's non-nil.  Oh, wait, not so easily,
> I see that ‘yes-or-no-p’ is implemented in C.

Why is that a problem?  C code can access Lisp variables and can call
Lips functions.

> Is there a particular reason why it's not in Lisp?

Probably history, coupled with the fact that a few things it does are
easier done in C.

> In any case this would be better customization to choose between
> “yes/no” and “y/n”.

Why better?

> Regarding a new multiple options reading function ‘read-answer’, I'm
> not sure where to put it.

How many callers does it have now, and which callers are those?