bug#7631: 24.0.50; inconsistency in event-convert-list and event-basic-type

[Don March]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> (event-convert-list '(t)) ; => 116
>
>> There's good reason to want this to eval to t (i.e. the symbol, not
>> the char).
>
> Could you explain what is this good reason?

I guess it boils down to the expected result of:

(setq event t)

(event-convert-list
 (append (event-modifiers event)
        (list (event-basic-type event)))) ; => 116, not t

In my mind, this should be an identity function (in the mathematical
sense) for events; if you take the event-modifiers and the
event-basic-type and then splice them together, the result should be
the original event.

A simplified version of what I was doing when I found this (which may
or may not be important) was something along the lines of:

(defun swap-C-and-M (event)
 (event-convert-list
  (append
   (mapcar (lambda (x) (case x
                         ('control 'meta)
                         ('meta    'control)
                         ('click   nil)
                         (t x)))
           (event-modifiers event))
   (list (event-basic-type event)))))

(setq new-keymap (make-sparse-keymap))

(map-keymap (lambda (key def)
             (define-key new-keymap
               (vector (swap-C-and-M key))
               def))
           isearch-mode-map)

(swap-C-and-M ?\M-x) ; => 24
(swap-C-and-M 'foo)  ; => foo
(swap-C-and-M t)     ; => 116

(lookup-key new-keymap [?t]) ; => isearch-other-control-char
(lookup-key new-keymap [t])  ; => nil