Subject: Re: bug#50731: `progress-reporter-update' docstring and `backward-sexp' interaction

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2021 15:12:51 -0700

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> A) We should support the above convention of using three dashes in
>>    `backward-sexp'.  (This is the rough ASCII equivalent of an em dash.)
>>
>> B) We should just not use the above convention in
>>    `progress-reporter-update'.
>
> None of the above?  I guess I don't yet understand the root cause for
> the problem.

I guess I have mixed up two different things above.

>From my point of view, the first thing to do is to decide is if this
`backward-sexp' behavior is a bug or not.  So this comes down to if we
think that "---" should be treated as a delimiter, just as " - " is, in
the context of ELisp docstrings.

I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I did find the current
behavior somewhat surprising when I saw it.

On the other hand, even if this is a bug, it might very well not be
worth fixing as the "---" delimiter is not very commonly used.