Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!vsi1!wyse!td2cad!mipos3!nate
From: nate@hobbes.intel.com (Nate Hess)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Re: (supposed) Trouble with auto-fill
Summary: It *is* a problem
Keywords: auto-fill
Message-ID: <3357@mipos3.intel.com>
Date: 19 Dec 88 22:08:44 GMT
References: <2308@bucsb.UUCP> <8812142023.AA23890@esl.ESL.COM>
Sender: news@mipos3.intel.com
Reply-To: woodstock@hobbes.intel.com (Nate Hess)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA
Lines: 44
In-reply-to: lrs@esl.esl.com (Lynn Slater)
Posting-Front-End: Gnews 2.0

In article <8812142023.AA23890@esl.ESL.COM>, lrs@esl (Lynn Slater) writes:
[replying to someone he didn't attribute]
>> WRONG!  Of course RET should cause auto-filling when in AUTO-FILL-MODE!

>This seems like a fairly dogmatic reply when the previous message
>showed that this is not universally agreed upon.
>WHY do you consider this behavior "broken/wrong/screwed up" and why
>should we not be using autofill-mode for this? 

Yes, his reply does seem a tad dogmatic...  :-)#  Still, though, I can't
imagine why you wouldn't want RET to cause auto-filling.  18.52 is the
first incarnation of GNU Emacs that I'm aware of that doesn't do it, and
it's burned me several times.  (As burned as you can get with lack of
auto-fill, I guess... :-)#

Anyway, what you're wondering is, apparently, why you would want RET to
auto-fill in the first place.  Maybe that will become clear if I explain
how not having it burns me.

Imagine that you're typing a paragraph such as the following, and you
want it auto-filled:

	This is an example sentence, one which we're typing in Emacs's
	text-mode, and which we want to absolutely be auto-filled, without fail.

Now, if you type that sentence in, and you have a fill-column of, say,
72, (the default) then, when you press RET after typing the period,
18.52 doesn't auto-fill correctly; it leaves the "fail." hanging out
past the fill-column.  I imagine that's why the previous poster said
that this behaviour seems "WRONG".  Things end up even worse if the last
word of the paragraph happens to be long.  Then, you get the last line
wrapped around past 80 columns, with the `\`, and 18.52 *still* doesn't
auto-fill when you press RET.

What I'm curious about is why this behaviour was changed in the first
place, and whether there is a variable that controls how RET behaves in
auto-fill mode.

--woodstock
--
	   "What I like is when you're looking and thinking and looking
	   and thinking...and suddenly you wake up."   - Hobbes

woodstock@sc.intel.com    ...!{decwrl|hplabs!oliveb|amd}!intelca!mipos3!nate