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Re: what means "intervals".


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: what means "intervals".
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2021 23:21:08 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/28.0.50 (gnu/linux)

> I read this section as saying that some editors support adding
> attributes to text by first defining a range of positions and then
> specifying what properties that range of positions should have. Emacs,
> on the other hand, works differently, and does not use the concept of a
> distinct "interval" object to describe the attributes of text in the buffer.

My take on it is that back during Emacs-19 development, there were
discussions about what kind of functionality to add, where Lucid ended
up going with "extents" whereas the official Emacs tree ended up going
with text-properties (Lucid's "extents" are similar to Emacs's
"overlays"), and this chapter was basically written as a justification
of the choice of text properties over the choice of extents.

This was back during the "great Emacs schism".


        Stefan




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