Re: [External] : New key binding syntax

[Richard Stallman]

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I agree with your points 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6.

  > 7. I'm in favor of letting `kbd' and Help descriptions
  > drop the use of angle brackets altogether.

I agree that that would be good -- provided no ambiguity results.
Does anyone see a concrete problem with this?

  > 3. Personally, I don't feel a need to allow the
  > argument to `kbd' to be used on its own (e.g., passed
  > to `define-key" or its replacement), in place of using
  > (kbd ARG) - let alone feel a need to prescribe that.

To allow the new syntax in arguments to old functions such as
`define-key'  would be desirable if it doesn't cause problems.
But I think it would lead to incompatibilities or conflicts,
where an argument has one meaning as a key sequence (old style)
and another as an argument to `kbd', so I think we can't do it.

I suggest defining new functions to replace `define-key' and friends,
that will take a new-style key sequence as argument and will NOT accept
an old-style key sequence.

  > \"S o m\" is _not_ a key sequence.  It's not a
  > "sequence of the keys 'S', 'o' and 'm'".

I can't make head or tail of that.  Why the backslashes
before those doublequotes?

With the default Emacs key bindings, S o m is not a valid
key sequence, because S is not a prefix key.
But it COULD be a valid key sequence if you defined S
as a prefix key, then defined S o as a prefix key.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)