Re: transient-mark-mode: change default

[Richard Stallman]

    Basically, I think that even people who dislike transient-mark-mode
    might appreciate the ability to explicitly pass a region as
    an argument (so that M-; behaves differently, as well as a slew
    of other commands).

I would like to have a way to do this if it did not surprise me or get
in the way.  I don't know whether Transient Mark mode plus
mark-even-if-inactive will achieve that.

I tried using Transient Mark mode for a while, and I did not like it.
I did not try Transient Mark mode with mark-even-if-inactive.  I could
try it and see what problems strike me.

    By the way, why is mark-active always set when transient-mark-mode is nil ?
    It seems that all the code that uses mark-active (at least the C code)
    only looks at it if transient-mark-mode is non-nil, so why don't
    we deactivate the mark regardless of transient-mark-mode ?

There is Lisp code that checks mark-active without checking
transient-mark-mode.  See for instance facemenu.el.
We could change it to check transient-mark-mode also.
If we make such changes, then why will it matter if mark-active
is non-nil when not in Transient Mark mode?