🚀 go-pugleaf

woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) and loki@moncam.uucp (Harry
Fearnhamm), talking about:
> > (a) false charpath
...
> ...I have
> never heard of it before, but it would seem to be a very subtle bug.  I'd
> call it that, because to my knowlege it is not documented behavior...

(Maybe it's a bug in the documentation.:-)  Actually, "charpath" does what
you "want" it to do with the current point in most situations.  But the
red book isn't explicit here, as far as I can tell.  There are two ways to
reason why it does what it does:
	- charpath works like show; it's described in terms of show.  So
	  you probably want it to behave as much like show as is reason-
	  able.  (Most real uses of charpath seem to be just fancy
	  rendering of characters in ways you can't do with show.)  That
	  means that the current point should move by the string escapement,
	  without regard for the generated path.
	- As Fearnhamm suggested, the charpath behavior maintains the
	  useful effect that, for example:
	  (a) false charpath
	  (b) false charpath
	  (c) false charpath
	  gives the same effect as:
	  (abc) false charpath
	  It would be surprising if it didn't.  (Splitting into multiple
	  charpaths might happen if you had font changes in between the
	  pieces.)

So...it seems it would be most useful if the red book added a note that the
current point after a charpath is the same as if the corresponding show had
been executed.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com    uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd     (303)449-2870
   ...Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.