>> Yes, but let me first make sure I understand. Is the reason that we
>> do not want _any_ symbol as car of the list that forbidding _any_
>> symbol as car of the list actually seems _more natural_ than just
>> forbidding lambda? It seems that any symbol other than lambda can not
>> be mistaken for the car of an anonymous lambda expresion and hence
>> could not lead to ambiguity.
> One possible reason is that if we allow almost all symbol lists, people
> will tend to overlook the need for a `lambda' special case, write their
> code to use straight-forward symbol lists -- and odd bugs will arise
> when lambda does happen to occur at the beginning of such a list.
> Always requiring an initial "" forces the problem to be dealt with, so
> will make such code more robust.
I don't like the idea of changing assoc-string to also match symbols.
Maybe it won't lead to any catastrophe, but it just sounds wrong.
I don't like the idea of adding "" at the beginning of a completion table.
Here I have a good reason, which is that it changes the behavior:
(try-completion "" '("aaa" "aab" "aac")) => "aa"
(try-completion "" '("" "aaa" "aab" "aac")) => ""
Honestly, what's so great about being able to use lists of symbols rather
than lists of strings? In Emacs-21, we don't even allow lists of strings,
but only lists of pairs whose car is a string, and people haven't complained
about it.
Stefan
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