intern-soft, find-face/get-face, and facep for determining faces' definedness

[Brian Palmer]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 16:45:38 +0900, Miles Bader <miles at lsi.nec.co.jp> wrote:
> Brian Palmer <bpalmer at gmail.com> writes:
> In Emacs this is equivalent to
> 
>    (defun find-face (face) (and (facep face) face))
> 
> Why exactly do you want to use `find-face' anyway?  Why not just avoid
> using `facep' except in a boolean context?

Well, find-face returns a face object in xemacs. I'm proposing a new function 
to add to gnu emacs so that there's <rant>one fewer arbitrary
difference between
emacs and xemacs that causes inconvenience and unnecessary friction for 
those of us who code third-party applications or help users of both xemacs and 
emacs</rant>. If find-face in emacs didn't return a face object, it
wouldn't be doing
a very good job of compatibility, now. 

The proposed patch I outlined, and the stupid way in which it has to
differ across
emacs and xemacs, shows that there's a use for improving compatibility.