Subject: bug#6390: Should not regexp-quote quote newline?

From: MON KEY <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:18:43 -0400

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Lennart Borgman
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> All I proposed was that it should write tab as \t too.

 i) This is not the extent of what you proposed;
ii) It is none-the-less a bad idea;

Newline and formfeed are control characters which affect the display
and interpretation of vertical character motion and display. Tab OTOH
is horizontal whitespace and doesn't affect vertical display in the
same manner (either syntactically or visually).

Regardless, the function name `print-escape-newlines' and its
documentation SAY NOTHING ABOUT ESCAPING TAB CHARACTERS!!!!!

What you really want is `print-escape-arbitrarily-for-lennart' :P
You can implement such a feature by cobbling together various
bits of code from format-spec.el format.el descr-text.el pp.el and
`filter-buffer-substring'.

> On a brighter side I think you have misunderstood my question and
> suggestion.

I well understood your suggestion as presented:

,----
| Unfortunately print-escape-newlines does not quote tab, only newline
| and form-feed. Which in my opinion is a bug. To fix this just copy 5
| lines in print.c at line 1667 and replace form-feed with tab. (I have
| just done that in my patched copy, but it is easier to do this by hand
| then to use a patch.)
`----

If you want your suggestions to be understood by others with as little
ambiguity as possible you _must_ submit patches or example code.

As written I read your 'suggestion' to say:

 "... replace form-feed with tab ..."

In the absence of a patch/example how else could/should it have been
read? FWIW I _did_ take time to examine lines ~1667 of print.c and it
certainly wasn't clear to me what you intended.

Thanks for wasting my time twice. Once in attempting to understand
what you meant and now a second time to clarify a mutual
misunderstanding.

Multiply this type of waste by the number of people (now and in the
future) whom reference this bug report and you've potentially wasted
alot of people's time.

> I might not have proposed that if I knew it was that utterly
> disturbing to someone. ;-)

I doubt that.

You seem all too ready to file ambiguous bug reports without
backtraces and/or to suggest changes/fixes to vacuous `bugs' without
an accompanying patch or example source which is illustrative of both
a problem and of a proposed solution.

Indeed, I do find this utterly disturbing on your part (esp. in the
aggregate).

--
/s_P\