Consistent naming in woman.el

Consistent naming in woman.el

[Kaushal Modi]

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Hi all,

woman.el has a mix of WoMan- and woman- prefixes.
This makes doing M-x slower and you also need to remember if the
command/function you are using starts with WoMan- or woman-.

Is it OK to set all defun/defvar/etc prefixes to "woman-"?

We can then mark the "WoMan-" prefixed defun/var as obsolete.

Also if we go down that path, what all needs to be marked obsolete?

- Only the defcustoms and interactive defuns?

Or

- All defvars/defcustoms and defuns (interactive or not)?

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Re: Consistent naming in woman.el

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:

> Is it OK to set all defun/defvar/etc prefixes to "woman-"?
> We can then mark the "WoMan-" prefixed defun/var as obsolete.

Sounds like a reasonable idea to me.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

Re: Consistent naming in woman.el

[Stefan Monnier]

> woman.el has a mix of WoMan- and woman- prefixes.
> This makes doing M-x slower and you also need to remember if the
> command/function you are using starts with WoMan- or woman-.

Not sure about this case, but such capitalization has been used in some
Elisp packages to indicate "internal" vs "exported" functions/vars/commands.

> Is it OK to set all defun/defvar/etc prefixes to "woman-"?

Please try to figure out exactly what the woman-vs-WoMan distinction was
intended to mean.  Maybe "WoMan-" should turn into "woman--" (which is
the semi-official notation used nowadays to express that a fun/var is
"internal").

> - Only the defcustoms and interactive defuns?

AFAICT there are no "WoMan-" defcustoms.
But other than that, yes I think just keep obsolete aliases for
interactive functions should be sufficient.


        Stefan


PS: Of course we're talking about doing this in master.

Re: Consistent naming in woman.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2016 08:24:12 -0500
> 
> > woman.el has a mix of WoMan- and woman- prefixes.
> > This makes doing M-x slower and you also need to remember if the
> > command/function you are using starts with WoMan- or woman-.
> 
> Not sure about this case, but such capitalization has been used in some
> Elisp packages to indicate "internal" vs "exported" functions/vars/commands.

Indeed.  We have something similar in info.el, I think.

Re: Consistent naming in woman.el

[Mark Oteiza]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
>> Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2016 08:24:12 -0500
>> 
>> > woman.el has a mix of WoMan- and woman- prefixes.
>> > This makes doing M-x slower and you also need to remember if the
>> > command/function you are using starts with WoMan- or woman-.
>> 
>> Not sure about this case, but such capitalization has been used in some
>> Elisp packages to indicate "internal" vs "exported" functions/vars/commands.
>
> Indeed.  We have something similar in info.el, I think.

Also man.el

RE: Consistent naming in woman.el

[Drew Adams]

> > Not sure about this case, but such capitalization has been used in some
> > Elisp packages to indicate "internal" vs "exported"
> functions/vars/commands.
> 
> Indeed.  We have something similar in info.el, I think.

And in Customize: `Custom-*' commands.

But no, the convention (FWIW) is _not_ designed to distinguish
"internal" from "exported" things.  (The very notion of "internal"
vs "exported" is somewhat alien to tradtional Emacs, IMO.)

The convention is there to make it easier to match some command
names when completing (including for `C-h f', but mainly for `M-x').
The idea is to not present you with too many, somewhat extraneous,
commands when you use `M-x'.  The names of more esoteric commands
are capitalized, the idea being that you will more likely type
lowercase, and so will not be bothered with those names.

That is, commands that are more commonly expected to be used with
`M-x' are not capitalized when this convention is followed.
Commands that are expected to be invoked less often using `M-x'
(e.g. invoked mainly by keys or menus) are capitalized.

Thus:
`info', but `Info-virtual-index'
`customize-option', but `Custom-help'

Whether this convention is really useful nowadays, since completion
can include partial-complete, substring matching etc., is debatable.
But that was the idea, anyway, AFAIK.