^X^W and GTJFN defaults

[Rob Austein <sra@lcs.mit.edu>]

   Date: Tue, 9 May 89 01:35:44 PDT
   From: "Michael J. Konopik" <ZZZ@sri-nic.arpa>

   When I use ^X^S to save a file, emacs knows what filename to which the
   buffer is written.  How come, then, ^X^W can't have the GTJFN defaults
   initialized?  This all-or-nothing behavior makes it difficult to write
   the file to a new extension when the filename is too long to all fit on
   the mode line (f'rinstance, writing THIS-IS-A-LONG-FILE.TXT out to
   THIS-IS-A-LONG-FILE.NEW).
   It's been awhile since I used emacs on Twenex, but I coulda sworn that
   this worked at MIT as recently as 1987...

It does work that way at MIT (well, when we had any 20s to run it on).
But at some point in EMACS's travels from MIT to the rest of the world
somebody decided to make the filename defaulting work like all other
Twenex programs rather than like all other ITS programs.  I remember
noticing the behavior you report while using EMACS at Stanford and not
beig too happy with it.

Or maybe it's just that Stanford and SRI are using an emacs that's
based on the 1983 "last official release" and this behavior was added
at MIT since then.  (We didn't have EMACS where I was in 1983, so I
don't know.)

--Rob