Subject: bug#40671: [DOC] modify literal objects

From: Michael Heerdegen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 06:40:39 +0200

Paul Eggert <[email-masked]> writes:

> So again: anyone who wants to revert my recent doc changes to emacs-27
> is welcome to do so.  Or, if you'd prefer to uniformly subsitute
> "literal object" for "constant"

I don't think "literal" covers all the cases you have in mind.  I don't
have an idea for a name of the class of cases you have in mind, because
I would not subsume all examples you gave in one class at all.  They
might be implementation- or memory-wise, but I don't think this is a good
perspective to describe a high-level language.

For example, the result of `symbol-name'.  In my eyes, modifying the
result has a side effect (renaming the symbol, but in a way that is not
supported), and this side effect will have undesired consequences.  But
that is true for other strings, too, that you would call mutable.  It's
hard to draw a clear line here, unless you think (C-) implementation
wise.

For what you describe I would just say that under certain conditions
certain objects that are, in principle, mutable, should not be changed
in certain circumstances because of implementation details, here is a
list of such cases: ..., that's it.

I'm sorry that I also can't offer patches because I don't speak texinfo.

> It's really not worth arguing about, and I apologize for stirring up
> this hornet's nest.

I've never been called a hornet before.

Michael.