Re: proposal to make null string handling more emacs-y

[Andreas Schwab]

Steve Yegge <address@hidden> writes:

> The most recent occurrence is relatively fresh:  I was observing some
> annoying
> behavior in a Google elisp library -- one that had been doing some path
> manipulation
> and choking on nil because, for whatever reason, `temporary-file-directory'
> had
> been bound to nil.  So I fixed up the Google function to handle nil the
> same way
> it handles the empty string.  And I glanced around and noticed that the same
> hack had been applied all over the place, sometimes smoothed over with
> macros
> or what have you.  It was a lot of smoothing over what appears to be a core
> wrinkle.

I see many places that check if temporary-file-directory is bound at
all, but none that special cases a value of nil.  This is just to
support Emacs before 20.3 where the variable didn't exist yet.

Andreas.

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