Re: [ELPA] New package: dict

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>
> Cc: philipk@posteo.net,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 14 May 2023 09:41:52 +0300
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > How about adding to dictionary.el a customizable function that
> > dictionary-search would call instead of its default operation?
> 
> Thanks, this would be a good way to expose the different behavior that I
> want to add.  However, my difficulty lies elsewhere.  The issue I
> brought up in my previous message is with implementing this behavior
> without introducing unnecessary code duplication to dictionary.el.
> 
> In short, we need two things: a way to obtain a word's definition and a
> way to obtain dictionary matches given some input (for completion).
> dictionary.el does these things already, but in way that's too coupled
> with its user interface to admit reuse for my purposes.  So the question
> is whether to add the needed stuff from Dict to dictionary.el and accept
> some code duplication, or try to refactor the parts of dictionary.el
> that communicate with the dictionary server to provide a cleaner API.

I'd say try the latter if it's reasonably easy; otherwise try the
former.