Subject: Re: bug#8935: 24.0.50; `substitute-command-keys' doc

From: Andreas Schwab <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:09:46 +0200

"Drew Adams" <[email-masked]> writes:

> Escaping a character means making it act normally, not specially.  Only the \
> acts specially,

Wrong.

> and it does so only when it precedes [, {, etc.

Right.  And only this is of interest.

> It is _enough_ to say that \= escapes a \, preventing it from
> introducing a substitution when followed by =, [, etc.

No, this is the wrong thing to do.  The doc string should say how to
produce a value that contains the two character sequences '\=' or '\['.
That's the *whole* point of the examples (and these are *examples*, not
specification).

You don't need '\=' to produce a backslash in the value.  So that is
useless to say so.

A doc string needs to get to the point, not be technically correct.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, [email-masked]
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."