From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.ciao.gmane.io!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Imports / inclusion of s.el into Emacs Date: Sat, 02 May 2020 23:40:31 -0400 Message-ID: References: <266155d4-f9c0-8ed3-8df5-32feea171076@yandex.ru> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="ciao.gmane.io:159.69.161.202"; logging-data="115866"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, dgutov@yandex.ru To: Philippe Vaucher Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sun May 03 05:43:45 2020 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jV5Xd-000U3x-5H for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 03 May 2020 05:43:45 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:37984 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jV5Xc-0006Du-6g for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sat, 02 May 2020 23:43:44 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:36366) by lists.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jV5UX-0001CX-Ie for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 02 May 2020 23:40:33 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:44623) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jV5UX-000217-9Q; Sat, 02 May 2020 23:40:33 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1jV5UV-00018G-IM; Sat, 02 May 2020 23:40:31 -0400 In-Reply-To: (message from Philippe Vaucher on Fri, 1 May 2020 20:05:22 +0200) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:248621 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] You're proposing that we adopt a policy of adding functions to Emacs's standard name space as if that cost nothing. Any function that anyone thinks provides the tiniest simplification, we would add. Adding so many functions would be detrimental in many ways. Perhaps nowadays the increased computer memory size would not matter. It would not matter for five or ten new functions; for hundreds, perhaps it would. But computer memory size is the smallest part of the problems they would cause. There is also human memory size. That policy would mean more names that every Emacs Lisp programmer would need to remember. It would mean more names to document in the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. It would mean more pages to print the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, making it cost more. It would mean more text to maintain when something changes. With such a weak thresold for adding a functionb name, we would have these costs over and over. The cl library caused these problems. It was not gratuitous -- it provided useful features. But eventually we decided that no package included in Emacs can use the cl library an run time. We fix packages to use those facilities in other ways that don't pollute the namespace. I suggest we adopt the same policy towards s.el, which is entirely gratuitous. We can also improve the standard names for string functions. They were invented a few at a time, and there is room to make them more systematic. This way we would get the improvement that is actually useful, while paying much lower costs in incompatibility and bloat. The s.el approach is designed to maximize the costs. -- Dr Richard Stallman Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)