GNU bug report logs - #79469
31.0.50; Ungrammatical sentence from describe-function

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Package: emacs;

Reported by: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman <at> gmx.net>

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:42:01 UTC

Severity: normal

Found in version 31.0.50

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From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman <at> gmx.net>
To: 79469 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#79469: 31.0.50; Ungrammatical sentence from describe-function
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:41:16 +0200
[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]
Calling `describe-function' on a noninteractive non-byte-compiled
function produces an ungrammatical sentence in the *Help* buffer:

0. emacs -Q
1. Load a non-byte-compiled file that contains a noninteractive function
   definition, e.g. edt-user.el from the Emacs "etc" directory.
2. Call `describe-function' on a noninteractive function from that file,
   e.g. `C-h f edt-setup-user-bindings RET'.
==> The *Help* buffer now begins with this sentence:

edt-setup-user-bindings is a interpreted-function in
‘~/src/emacs/emacs-master/etc/edt-user.el’.

It should say "...is an interpreted-function...".

Here are three possible fixes:

[Message part 2 (text/x-patch, attachment)]
[Message part 3 (text/x-patch, attachment)]
[Message part 4 (text/x-patch, attachment)]
[Message part 5 (text/plain, inline)]
Of these three I prefer the first, since it directly generates the
correct string, while the other two change an incorrect string to the
correct one.

While all three are ad hoc fixes, I think the undoubted complexity of a
more general fix is unjustified here, because (unless I've overlooked
something) `interpreted-function' is the only function type symbol
returned by `cl-type-of' in `help-fns-function-description-header' that
results in the problem (since it begins with a vowel).


In GNU Emacs 31.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version
 3.24.49, cairo version 1.18.4) of 2025-09-18 built on strobelfs2
Repository revision: 3415fa15e4f0a146d1f08df981dc9894bf2ff320
Repository branch: master
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12101016
System Description: Linux From Scratch r12.3-20

Configured using:
 'configure -C 'CFLAGS=-Og -g3' PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/qt6/lib/pkgconfig'

Configured features:
ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG
LCMS2 LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 MODULES NATIVE_COMP NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER PNG
RSVG SECCOMP SOUND SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER
WEBP X11 XDBE XIM XINERAMA XINPUT2 XPM XRANDR GTK3 ZLIB

This bug report was last modified today.

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