Re: Enhancements to "minor-mode-map-alist" functionality.

[Kim F. Storm]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     Giving each package the ability to maintain individual alists means that 
> they
>     don't need any extra code to ensure that no other packages have messed it 
> up.
> 
> That may be true, but I'd like to see what the issue is more concretely.
> If cua and viper tried to use one alist, what would they have to do
> to prevent it from being messed up?  What does "messed up" mean in this
> context?

Changing the sequence or removing an element from the alist.

Even with one list, this may be unlikely to happen in practice, but I
don't understand why this is a big issue.  At the C level, having a
list of alists is no more complex to handle than a single list [as the
current_minor_maps function already has to deal with a number of
alists].  I know - I've already written the code.

But IMO it is much easier - at the lisp level - to maintain separate
alists on a list of alists, than to merge completely unrelated alists
into a single list.  Especially when it comes to remove those alists.

With one list, each of the alist elements must be (carefully) removed
one by one, whereas with a list of alists, it is just a single element
(alist) which needs to be removed.  Much simpler and cleaner IMO.


-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk