Hi, Xah.

One small but important point you made:

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 04:50:50PM -0700, Xah Lee wrote:

The other side of the argument is that *scratch* is intended for
temporary, unimportant doodling, and for anybody who uses it this way,
being continually prompted to save it would rapidly become annoying.

I don't think there's a built in option to change this. However, you
could write a hook function to add in this check. The hook is
`kill-buffer-query-functions' and is documented in the Elisp manual on
the page "Killing Buffers".

[ .... ]

A small point about this file (at
<http://xahlee.org/emacs/modern_operations.el>): you don't really need
the function `kill-line-backwards', since M-0 C-k will do this for you.
However, that key binding is a bit clumsy. You could use it like this:

(defun kill-line-backwards ()
"Doc string ...."
(interactive)
(kill-line 0))