Re: master b342815: Improve define-function omitted-arg documentation

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/27/2016 10:02 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> > IMO all the stuff about t is an internal implementation detail that has
> > no place in the documentation.
> Ach, blast, I see it was mentioned briefly before.

Yes, and I'm afraid the topic needs to be covered in the documentation. 
I was confused by the old, terser doc, and Eli was I think right in 
suggesting that define-function's atypical design be covered more clearly.

Alternatively, I suppose we could improve define-function's design....


> Prejudiced against Fortran, are we?

Guilty as charged. :-) Though there were other reasons for that part of 
the change: the old Fortrannish documentation mentioned gud-find-c-expr, 
a function that is no longer in GNU Emacs. Plus, the old doc had a 
complicated song-and-dance about hooks, whereas the new simple.el 
example is, well, simpler.

> We previously decided against doing this: http://debbugs.gnu.org/8646

Sorry, I wasn't aware of that old decision. I made the change because of 
a more-recent statement by the current maintainer that we should strive 
to eliminate warnings rather than continue to live with the current 
chatter, which too often leads developers to ignore warnings. See:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2015-11/msg00902.html