10.7.7 Extended Interactive

Gnus extends the standard Emacs interactive specification slightly to allow easy use of the symbolic prefix (see section 8.3 Symbolic Prefixes). Here's an example of how this is used:

(defun gnus-summary-increase-score (&optional score symp) (interactive (gnus-interactive "P\ny")) ... )

The best thing to do would have been to implement gnus-interactive as a macro which would have returned an interactive form, but this isn't possible since Emacs checks whether a function is interactive or not by simply doing an assq on the lambda form. So, instead we have gnus-interactive function that takes a string and returns values that are usable to interactive.

This function accepts (almost) all normal interactive specs, but adds a few more.

`y'

The current symbolic prefix--the gnus-current-prefix-symbol variable.

`Y'

A list of the current symbolic prefixes--the gnus-current-prefix-symbol variable.

`A'

The current article number--the gnus-summary-article-number function.

`H'

The current article header--the gnus-summary-article-header function.

`g'

The current group name--the gnus-group-group-name function.