Re: RE: Auto Fill Comments

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2020 at 9:42 AM
> From: tomas@tuxteam.de
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: RE: Auto Fill Comments
>
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 12:22:11AM +0100, Christopher Dimech wrote:
> > That's a great example.  We can have a function that sets fill-column
> > as buffer-local and hook it to programming mode, c-mode say.
>
> Why mix a mode in? This makes the example unnecessarily complex.
> Just fill-column, buffer-local, that's it.

Because we should not kid users by showing an example that we already
know is buffer local, and don't have to do anything.  Still, perhaps
doing that on the reference creates more problems than solves.

> >                                                     That would
> > be a useful example.  And users can try it out and see things work.
> >
> > Yes, it is repeating and RTFM, but with a serious code example to excite
> > people to write actual code after the prose.
>
> The interesting challenge is that different people have diverse
> approaches at learning. Covering as much ground as possible
> without exploding in size (which would hinder learning, too)
> is that Herculean task. That's probably why there's more than
> 1 book.
>
> I claim the Emacs folks have done an outstanding job with the
> two manuals and the introduction /on top of/ the whole "live"
> doc (docstrings, ref to source, etc.). The only software projects
> I could name rivalling that doc would be Don Knuth's TeX and
> METAFONT, but they are (one? several?) orders of magnitude less
> complex than Emacs at this point.
>
> Cheers
>  - t
>