Re: how-many/count-matches for non-interactive use

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I wish you had made a list of the functions you didn't check,
   because we should ask the maintainers of those files to check them.

I already mentioned ibuf-ext.el and allout.el earlier.

I know looked at the three remaining calls in simple.el myself.  The
call in `kill-ring-save' _seems_ to me to be an example of correct
non-message use.  I have used `kill-ring-save' in keyboard macros
before I knew Elisp and was satisfied with its behavior.  I do not
know whether the calls in `next-line' and `previous-line' should be
considered "abstractly correct" or not.  I have used these tons of
times in keyboard macros and hit beginning or end of buffer countless
times.  No complaints from me _as a user_ about the present behavior.

There are tons of uses in help.el, help-fns, faces.el, apropos.el,
which are all of exactly the same "help-xref" type.  I did not check
these.  However, I somehow get the impression that whoever wrote the
code knew what they were doing.

Some functions quite simply make no sense to be called from a keyboard
macro in their present form, say ediff-version and emerge-version.
For functions of the *-version variety to be useful in keyboard
macros, they should accept an HERE argument, that prints the version
number at point in the buffer, like emacs-version does.

That leaves:

comint.el: comint-strip-ctrl-m
strokes.el: several.  Of those, strokes-prompt-user-save-strokes is
            another one that seems suspicious.  I am completely
            unfamiliar with strokes.el.  But these seem to be mouse
            related functions.  I do not know whether calling these
            from keyboard macros makes any sense to begin with.
newcomment.el: comment-indent-new-line
printing.el: several
woman.el: woman
man.el: Man-cleanup-manpage
dired-x.el: dired-omit-expunge, dired-x-bind-find-file
bookmark.el: bookmark-maybe-historicize-string, bookmark-bmenu-list 
ffap.el: several.
completion.el: add-completion, add-permanent-completion
menubar.el: menu-bar-make-toggle
pcomplete.el:  pcomplete