Re: Always-true predicate?

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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You asked

                                           what's wrong with
  > #'pretend-to-pay-attention?

That is the wrong question, the wrong way to think about a proposed
feature.  It presupposes a policy of adding every possible feature,
unless there is "something wrong with it".  That leads to more and
more bloat.

Every feature, even a trivial one, implies more complexity -- not just
in code, which is the least burdensome, but in documentation, and in
what users need to know.  The size of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
is a problem we can measure.

To keep bloat in check, we must insist that any new feature be
justified by benefit.

I am sure there will be occasions to use this proposed function.  Will
they be frequent enough to make it worth while?  My judgment says they
won't be.

It is possible to make an estimate based on more knowledge.
The files lisp/c*.el add up to around 20,000 lines.  Since they are
unrelated in purpose and history, they would make a good sample.  How
about looking through those files for places where using
always-return-t would make the code cleaner?

If you find quite a few in that sample, that would start to support
adding this feature.  However, there would also be the question of
_how much_ cleaner the code would be in each place.


In regard to user options whose values are functions,
I think it is good to allow nil and t as values.
That would be cleaner than setting the option to `ignore'
or always-return-t.

-- 
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)