Hi. A while back (a few months ago) I wrote some interactive emacs lisp functions for personal use. At the time - a few months ago - I was using some version of emacs 24. Recently, I switched to a more stable system running emacs 23. I was surprised to discover that they were a bunch of rather basic built-ins that were undefined (like setf and incf) and some of the built-ins had a different api (like insert-char).

This is not intended as a rant. But I was wondering if anyone knew any of the philosophy and history of emacs relating to backwards and forwards compatibility. Also, where do I go to find out what specifically has been changed in Emacs Lisp with the various versions? I didn't notice a section about this in the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual (23 or 24).

Check out the NEWS file (<f1> C-n).

setf and incf used be part of CL emulation (accessible with (require 'cl)), now they are available separately (and autoloaded).

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