Re: Making a function than can only be used interactively

[Stefan Monnier]

> I do not want people to use the function non-interactively.

An interactive call is fundamentally a combination of "run the
interactive spec to get the args, and then call the function with those
args".  So, in a sense you can't avoid it.

But you can discourage non-interactive calls in various ways, depending
on how important you think it is.  The most standard way is to use

    (declare (interactive-only <foo>))

so that the compiler will emit a warning when it sees a non-interactive
call to that function (<foo> is the replacement you recommend for
non-interactive calls).

A more "forceful" way is to wrap your interactive function inside
a trivial keyboard macro:

    (defalias 'my-command
              (vector (lambda (...)
                        (interactive ..)
                        ...)))

this way `my-command` is a valid command but it's not a valid function.
I'd not recommend such a measure, tho.


        Stefan