emacs table-mode: why does a kill-ring-save on a (single) cell mark the (entire) buffer as “changed”?

• http://table.sourceforge.net
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Text-Based-Tables.html
• http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/textmodes/table.el
• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TableMode
• http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_table.html
• http://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Fun/*table–cell-kill-ring-save.html – within tables kill-ring-save is actually remapped to *table--cell-kill-ring-save
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Kill-Ring.html

That “feature” (marking the buffer as changed) is terribly annoying!!! You try to copy (AKA kill-ring-save) text from a table, and from now on something “tells” you, you “changed” the table – but actually you did not. You may be tempted to think, saving a file is a cheap operation, but what if the file is actually located on a remote machine and you are operating on the file through tramp and you cannot reach the machine for a couple of hours?!!

• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode
• https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

Why not change the buffer to read-only and kill-ring-save than? if you try to kill-ring-save in read-only mode, emacs shouts at you:

apply: Buffer is read-only: #<buffer …>

But yes, although emacs shouted at you, you succeeded copying the text in question to the kill-ring, and now you can paste it into wherever you want.