[no subject]

[BAK at MIT-AI (William A. Kornfeld)]

    Date: 14 October 1980 00:10-EDT
    From: Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at MIT-AI>
    Sender: dlw at CADR8 at MIT-AI

        Commands such as LowerCaseWord or ChangeFontWord should check for the existence of
        a region and apply to the region if it exists.

    I am not at all convinced that this is a good idea.  There exist
    commands for hacking the region.  Making commands of this sort (that you
    type so often that they are on single characters) do things
    conditionally can make them harder to use.  Sometimes the region exists
    by accident and you really don't want it.  As I understand it, the only
    commands that are conditional in this way (use the region if it exists,
    otherwise use ...) are things you don't call so often, like Compile
    Defun (which is going to be partially obsoleted soon by the new
    do-the-right-thing commands anyway).

I have found myself on several occasion assuming it should work and
discovered it doesn't.  Thus I think it'll be less confusing.  It is
true that region hacking versions of those commands exist; however,
given those changes, those region-hacking commands will be superfluous and
there will be less keyboard commands that the user will have to remember.  

[Do you REALLY call CompileDefun less often than ChangeFontWord?]