Re: RE: bounds-of-thing-at-point for paragraphs

[Christopher Dimech]

Looking at thingatpt.el is not helpful.  If you know important things
that are useful to know about it, place it at the top of the file.

I customarily define a documentation function for the file so that it
would be available interactively, even if mostly of interest to Elisp
Designers.


> Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM
> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> To: "Jean Louis" <bugs@gnu.support>
> Cc: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>, "Help Gnu Emacs" 
> <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> Subject: RE: bounds-of-thing-at-point for paragraphs
>
> > > (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'paragraph) works fine.
> > 
> > It works fine, but documentation does not describe it:
> > 
> >   bounds-of-thing-at-point is an autoloaded compiled Lisp function in
> >   ‘thingatpt.el’.
> > 
> >   (bounds-of-thing-at-point THING)
> > 
> >   Determine the start and end buffer locations for the THING at point.
> >   THING should be a symbol specifying a type of syntactic entity.
> >   Possibilities include ‘symbol’, ‘list’, ‘sexp’, ‘defun’,
> >   ‘filename’, ‘url’, ‘email’, ‘uuid’, ‘word’, ‘sentence’, ‘whitespace’,
> >   ‘line’, and ‘page’.
> > 
> >   See the file ‘thingatpt.el’ for documentation on how to define a
> >   valid THING.
> > 
> >   Return a cons cell (START . END) giving the start and end
> >   positions of the thing found.
> 
> Just read it more carefully.
> 
> 1. "Possibilities include"
>                   ^^^^^^^
> 
>    It doesn't say that those are the only possibilities.
> 
> 2. It points you to "`thingatpt.el' for documentation on
>    how to define a valid THING."  IOW, for documentation
>    what makes a THING defined for use by `thing-at-point'.
> 
> > > (thing-at-point 'paragraph) also works fine.
> > 
> > Also there documentation is not describing it:
> > 
> >   thing-at-point is an autoloaded compiled Lisp function in
> >   ‘thingatpt.el’.
> > 
> >   (thing-at-point THING &optional NO-PROPERTIES)
> > 
> >     Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 20.
> > 
> >   Return the THING at point.
> >   THING should be a symbol specifying a type of syntactic entity.
> >   Possibilities include ‘symbol’, ‘list’, ‘sexp’, ‘defun’,
> >   ‘filename’, ‘url’, ‘email’, ‘uuid’, ‘word’, ‘sentence’, ‘whitespace’,
> >   ‘line’, ‘number’, and ‘page’.
> 
> See above.  The word "include" doesn't mean the
> same thing as "include only" or "comprise".  The
> list of THINGS mentioned isn't exhaustive.
> 
> The English language includes the words "thing"
> and "point" (but it also includes a lot more words).
>