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

[Jeff Mincy]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004, stephen at xemacs.org wrote:

>>>>>> "Ben" == Ben Wing <ben at 666.com> writes:
> 
>     Ben> How many other predicates work that way?  How many work the
>     Ben> other way?
> 
> Does this really matter at all?

The numeric answer doesn't matter, but the question is equivalent to
asking which CL type predicates are for primitive types and how many
are for composite types.  CL function is a composite type made up of
symbols, lists, and <compiled-functions>.  CL symbol is a primitive type.

> I think the questions should be "does it make sense to both use
> symbols as names and expose the objects?", "if so, do we need to be
> able to tell the difference?", and "if not, should we suppress the
> objects or what should we do?"
> 
> And "should we support GNU-style anonymous faces (property lists)?"

And rephrasing the question - is face a primitive type #<face>[1], or
do view face as a composite type made up of #<face>, symbols and
anonymous faces?  Faces are named, so being able to use the name for
the face seems reasonable, more expressive, and convenient.  Anonymous
faces, well I haven't used them, but the intent is clear, and I can
imagine uses.

Footnotes:
[1]  whatever type of object make-face returns

-jeff