Subject: Re: bug#68246: 30.0.50; Add non-TS mode as extra parent of TS modes

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2024 02:32:50 +0200

On 20/01/2024 09:46, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2024 07:47:27 +0200
>> Cc: [email-masked], Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>,
>>   Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
>>
>> On 19/01/2024 07:12, Yuan Fu wrote:
>>>
>>> I don’t have anything insightful to contribute, but want to point out that in Emacs, “language” doesn’t always mean programming language. “Language” can also mean Chinese, English, etc, and Emacs are quite often used for editing natural language text. So it warrants some caution when using “language” to mean programming language specifically.
>>
>> That's a good point.
>>
>> But hopefully when the suffix -lang or -language is used in the symbol
>> name, the preceding word(s) will make it unambiguous.
> 
> Unfortunately, it doesn't.  Witness the parallel discussion of
> translating the manual into other languages.
> 
> Which is one (but not the only) reason why I asked repeatedly in this
> thread not to use the notion of "language" in this context: it is
> confusing for more than one reason.  I think Stefan suggested "content
> type" or something to that effect, which is better terminology, IMO.

People are welcome to rewrite the docs in terms of "content type", I 
have no problem with that and referred to this alternative multiple 
times in the emails.

But the term "language" is closer to my understanding of the issue, so 
it's easier for me to use when explaining. And I'm apparently not alone 
in that: if one looks at VS Code's UI, in the bottom right corner it 
offers the user the choice of the "language mode" for the current file. 
Among the choices of language modes, there are programming languages, of 
course (C, JavaScript, Ruby, ...), but also values like "Plain Text", 
"Ini", "Properties", "TeX", "Code Snippets", "Git Commit Message" and 
"Binary". To be clear, my proposal was not inspired by it--today is the 
first time I've examined that list this closely.