🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: 24 Jun 92 08:51:32 GMT
   From: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)

   Without wanting to comment on the socio-politics of the situation, and
   with the standard disclaimer about coming late to the debate, I wonder
   if someone would like to comment on what seems like a strategically
   questionable technical decision which has emerged from the discussion,
   namely to go for

   1) 'formatting in the files'

   first, as against

   2) 'temporary highlighting'

   in FSF's Emacs development (i.e. Emacs 19, 20, . . .).

   This seems both technically (in the sense that if you have (2), you
   can use that to implement (1), but not vice versa) and strategically
   (in that you are then in the business of defining and supporting a
   markup language to encode the formatting) backwards.

The idea is that there is a fundamental distinction between buffer
text and its properties (e.g., italics), and visual indicators such as
highlighting selected text, or the the gdb arrow, or marker glyphs
pointing to various buffer positions.  The text and its properties are
persistent entities which exist after emacs has finished, while
overlays such as highlighting are temporary indicators having more to
do with editing operations.

This distinction is completely separate from the implementation
mechanisms, which could be the same.