Info Catalog eintr: search-forward eintr: zap-to-char eintr: Summing up zap-to-char

eintr: progn

 
 8.1.4 The ‘progn’ Special Form
 ------------------------------
 
 ‘progn’ is a special form that causes each of its arguments to be
 evaluated in sequence and then returns the value of the last one.  The
 preceding expressions are evaluated only for the side effects they
 perform.  The values produced by them are discarded.
 
    The template for a ‘progn’ expression is very simple:
 
      (progn
        BODY...)
 
    In ‘zap-to-char’, the ‘progn’ expression has to do two things: put
 point in exactly the right position; and return the location of point so
 that ‘kill-region’ will know how far to kill to.
 
    The first argument to the ‘progn’ is ‘search-forward’.  When
 ‘search-forward’ finds the string, the function leaves point immediately
 after the last character in the target string.  (In this case the target
 string is just one character long.)  If the search is backwards,
 ‘search-forward’ leaves point just before the first character in the
 target.  The movement of point is a side effect.
 
    The second and last argument to ‘progn’ is the expression ‘(point)’.
 This expression returns the value of point, which in this case will be
 the location to which it has been moved by ‘search-forward’.  (In the
 source, a line that tells the function to go to the previous character,
 if it is going forward, was commented out in 1999; I don’t remember
 whether that feature or mis-feature was ever a part of the distributed
 source.)  The value of ‘point’ is returned by the ‘progn’ expression and
 is passed to ‘kill-region’ as ‘kill-region’’s second argument.
 

Info Catalog eintr: search-forward eintr: zap-to-char eintr: Summing up zap-to-char