---------------- -*- mode: text; coding: utf-8; fill-column: 70 -*- ---- ---- Humor (sometimes unintended) on the Emacs developer's list ---- ---- The Free Software Foundation claims no copyright on this file, ---- compiled from the public emacs-devel mailing list. ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Is it legal for a `struct interval' to have a total_length field ofzero?" "We can't be arrested for it as far as I know, but it is definitelyinvalid for an interval to have zero length." -- Miles Bader and RMS----------------------------------------------------------------------Re: lost argument and doc stringI remember when I lost an argument. Boy did that hurt! ;-). -- RMS---------------------------------------------------------------------- "'Cowardly' is not an adverb, although it looks like one. It is anadjective. It makes a statement about general temperament, ratherthan a specific occasion. I don't think Emacs has a generaltemperament." "Mine does." -- RMS and Eli Zaretskii---------------------------------------------------------------------- "In order to bring the user's attention to the minibuffer when anitem such as 'Edit -> Search' is activated from the menu, I was justthinking that we could draw a big rectangle around the minibuffer,blinking (or zooming in-and-out) until some input is typed in." "How about dancing elephants?" "They don't fit in my office." "Well once the elephants are done, your office will be much...bigger." -- Stefan Monnier, Miles Bader and Kai Grossjohann----------------------------------------------------------------------I remember these versions as yard-rocks (is that between inch-pebblesand mile-stones?). -- Kai Grossjohann---------------------------------------------------------------------- "I think it depends on video drivers. I cannot reproduce it on myhome PC, but I can at work." "Can you try to find a workaround at work? (I guess you don't needa homearound at home. ;-)" -- Jason Rumney and RMS----------------------------------------------------------------------By the way, I also really really hate this unibyte/multibyte problem.Sometimes I think I should have opposed to the introduction of such aconcept more strongly. imagine there's no unibyte it's easy if you try no bytes below us above us only chars imagine all the people living in multibyte -- Kenichi Handa----------------------------------------------------------------------I try to uphold the ideals that I was taught to value as an American,but every year I get less and less help from the United States. -- RMS---------------------------------------------------------------------- "If the terminfo entry is most likely wrong, and we know it, then itdoesn't make sense to follow it." "Nevertheless, until now, we always did." "So.... should we not fix old bugs?" "Why fix an old bug if you can write three new ones in the sametime?" -- Miles Bader, Eli Zaretskii and David Kastrup---------------------------------------------------------------------- [...] As is well known, people who speak American English tend tobe more resource-conscious and try to avoid wasting precious bitstransferring those redundant "u"s. Think of the number of occurrences of "color" and "behavior" in theEmacs tarball, multiply that by the number of times it'll bedownloaded, stored on hard disks, archived, ...that's a substantialsaving. -- Stefan Monnier----------------------------------------------------------------------Re: Parent of a derived mode's keymap. "I can't decide whether the title of this thread is more fitting fora blues song or a pulp fiction booklet. It certainly projects drama." "Hey, it says derived, not deprived." "Actually, for some keymaps 'depraved' would fit better." "I knew it! You're one of them vi lovers! There is nothing wrongwith Emacs using escape, meta, alt, control, and shift!" -- David Kastrup and Lute Kamstra---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Aren't user-defined constants useful in other languages?" "The only user-defined constant is ignorance. (With programmers,this is a variable concept ;-)" -- Juanma Barranquero and Thien-Thi Nguyen---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Uh, 'archaic' and 'alive' is not a contradiction." "Yes it is. 'Archaic' does not mean 'old' or 'early'. It means'obsolete'." "'He arche' in Greek means 'the beginning'. John 1 starts off with'En arche en ho Logos': in the beginning, there was the word. Now ofcourse we all know that Emacs was there before Word, but this mighthave escaped John's notice." -- David Kastrup and RMS----------------------------------------------------------------------Re: patch for woman (woman-topic-at-point) "Sorry for the long message. I wanted to make the problem clearalso for people not familiar with `woman'." "Most hackers, I take? For a moment there I thought you had a patch that you could put ona woman, and it would make her come right to the topic at pointwithout attempting any course of action that requires an advancecourse in divination. There'd be quite a sensational market for that, you know." -- Emilio Lopes and David Kastrup---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[T]here may be a good reason since the code explicitly checks forthis; see keyboard.c:789 [...]" "I think I understand, but I can't find the code in keyboard.c. Doyou really mean 'line 789'? Of which revision?" "Sorry; by 789, I mean 3262 :-P" -- Chong Yidong and Stefan Monnier---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[...] In my opinion, your change does not either increase ordecrease readability. It's a tossup." "Uh, setting tem to '', an artificial empty string, in order to havej incremented once again before breaking out of the finished loop isreadable? Is this kind of 'readable' synonymous to 'comprehensible withserious effort', reminiscent of mathematicians' use of 'trivial' assynonymous with 'provable with serious effort'?" -- RMS and David Kastrup----------------------------------------------------------------------Re: New Emacs Icon and Tango "What about using the 'happy face' with gnu horns?" "It would make Emacs the object of ridicule until the end of time." "Isn't it already?" "It's the object of ridicule until the end of _tape_. The jury isstill out about that end of time thing." -- Kim F. Storm, Miles Bader, RMS and David Kastrup---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Despite being a maths graduate, I can't think of any other suchconstants with anything like the universality of e and pi." "42" -- Alan Mackenzie and David Hansen---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[...] So please do not delete anything." "Done." -- RMS and David Kastrup---------------------------------------------------------------------- "I guess that can work in some circumstances, but it bypasses theprinter drivers. Couldn't that lead to problems for the printerdrivers?" "Current research is that software does not suffer feelings ofdepression or loneliness when it is left out of the picture, so Iwouldn't worry about it too much." -- Lennart Borgman and Jason Rumney
