A.2 Old Lisp Features in Emacs 20.3

Here are the most important of the features that you will learn to do without in Emacs 20.3:

Here are changes in the Lisp language itself:

• The functions line-beginning-position and line-end-position have been eliminated.

• The functions directory-files-and-attributes, file-attributes-lessp, and file-expand-wildcards, have been eliminated.

• The functions decode-coding-region and encode-coding-region leave text properties untouched, in case that is useful. (It rarely makes any sense, though.)

• The functions position-bytes and byte-to-position have been eliminated.

• Temporary buffers made with with-output-to-temp-buffer are now modifiable by default, and use Fundamental mode rather than Help mode.

• The functions sref interprets its index argument as a number of bytes, not a number of characters. And the function char-bytes actually tries to report on the number of bytes that a character occupies.

• The function process-running-child-p has been eliminated.

• The function interrupt-process and similar functions no longer do anything special when the second argument is lambda.

• The function define-prefix-command accepts only two arguments.

• The meaning of the second argument to read-char, read-event, and read-char-exclusive has been reversed: they use the current input method if the argument is if nil.

• The function with-temp-message has been eliminated.

• The function clear-this-command-keys has been eliminated.

• The functions gap-position and gap-size have been eliminated.

• In modify-face, an argument of (nil) has no special meaning.

• The base64 conversion functions have been eliminated.

• Wildcard support has been eliminated from find-file and allied functions.

• file-attributes returns the file size and the file inode number only as a simple integer.