Re: how to speed up Lisp devel time

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Christopher Dimech wrote:

> This complexity is not inherently negative, and there are
> compelling reasons to embrace it in certain situations.
> Commands with multiple optional arguments offer
> greater flexibility.

Eh, three arguments with default values, "this complexity"?

Actually, because of the Elisp limitation that optional
arguments must be last, in sequence, there are many functions
with three - or more - optional arguments.

If this is news to you:

 - there are 2058 hits for '&optional .* .* .*' in the
   Emacs source,

- 194 seems to be interactive.

Yeah, these commands are imperfect by definition but it is
clear there are many, many such cases of Elisp, not the least
in the Emacs core source.

~/src/emacs $ grep '&optional .* .* .*' **/*.el | wc -l
2058

~/serc/emacs $ grep -A 3 '&optional .* .*' **/*.el | grep '(interactive' | wc -l
194

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