(interactive) call or form?

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi all,

the article about Emacs and TeX is in the final stage of proof-reading.
(In case you didn't know, folks at the TUGboat are _extremely_ good
copyeditors, and they caught _a lot_ of typos/grammar/stylistic mistakes
in the paper!)  During the discussion, I started to think: can an
"interactive form" (i.e., the thing that makes a function a command) be
called an "interactive call"?  I supposed not, since `interactive' is
not actually "called", but I'm not so sure anymore.  Doing M-:
(interactive "whatever") yields nil, so I assume that calling
`interactive' actually does nothing (like `ignore'), and it is its
presence in the defun that matters.  (And I found out by experimenting
that it may be located anywhere in the defun, but not nested e.g. in an
`if'.)  Also, much of what I found is confirmed by the docstring, but
not everything.

So, is it better to call it a "form" or a "call"?

TIA,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl