Re: efficiently viewing Unix timestamps as dates

[Stefan Monnier]

> As long as the merge is smart this should work: if you have
> plane=1,face=A on (0, 5) and plane=2,face=B on (3, 10) the merge should
> be called just once for the region between 3 and 5.  I assume that's how
> you picture it too, though `re-merge-property' below doesn't do it.

Yes, of course, we wouldn't do it a char at a time.  The code was just
illustrating the kind of semantics you could expect.

> So the default plane is nil?

That would be a natural choice, but any value would do.

> That seems OK and backwards compatible.  But I don't know enough about
> the internals to say how much work this will be; I would guess "a
> lot" :)

Actually, I really don't think this needs that much work.
The change should be localized, and in code which is not tricky.

It will probably introduce a few minor backward compatibility issues,
mostly around the need to distinguish "get the merged value of property
`foo'" and "get the value of property `foo' in the default plane".


        Stefan