Re: Stepping Back: A Wealth Of Completion systems Re: [ELPA] New package: vertico

[Daniel Mendler]

> On Wed, Apr 07 2021, Gregory Heytings wrote:
> > I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I understand what the real
> > difference between "completing" and "selecting" is.  Do I understand
> > correctly that the difference is between, for example, expanding command names
> > (completing), and choosing an emoji in a list (selecting)?
>
> Yeah, I don't get it either. If I'm completing a command name, I can also say
> that I'm selecting a command name from all available command names. Or when I'm
> completing a file name, I'm selecting a file from all the files on my system.

I agree with both of you. I also don't see a significant difference 
between `completing-read' and a potential `selecting-read'. However, the 
`completing-read' API could benefit from a few small improvements as I 
proposed in my other mail. Given all the experience gained one may 
consider introducing a `completing-read2' which incorporates all the 
lessons learned and offers an API, which is a bit easier to use. But 
maybe the costs would outweigh the benefits and applying incremental 
improvements is actually the better approach, see for example the 
recently added `affixation-function'.

Daniel Mendler