John H Palmieri <John.H.Palmieri.2(a)nd.edu&gt; writes: I was very careful not to say that because it wouldn't be true. Although not stylistically "nice", binding keys to anonymous functions is very convenient and perfectly legal. But when you do that, you really shouldn't expect that part of `C-h k' output to be nice. No reason not to -- if you want to do it, I believe the patch will be accepted. It's just that I don't see it as a bug that would require our attention, if it can be considered a bug at all. If it makes you feel better, I believe I stumbled upon the variable accidentally. Accordance with the documentation is only one measure of correctness. There are others, such as Emacs 18 compatibility (very strong in keymap.c and event-stream.c), FSF Emacs compatibility, "intuitiveness", etc. I don't know. A perfunctory search yielded no matches, which might mean the feature is undocumented, along with the `retry-undefined-key-binding-unshifted' variable. But you can do that. Just bind "A" to a function that will signal error. Or bind it to `keyboard-quit'. Yes, that would be useful indeed. Like a "keymap property". Except that it's non-trivial to do, because keymaps actually hold subkeymaps, and the property should be propagated correctly.