Re: [Emacs-diffs] master b7fa6b1 1/4: Simplify use of FOR_EACH_TAIL

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I'm surprised you
> also decided to remove `tail`, since that one *is* used by the users of
> the macro and forcing them to use `li.tail` instead of the variable of
> their choice is rather odd.

Logically, the variable is part of the iterator, not of the surrounding code. I 
did at first write a macro along the lines that you suggest, and also tried 
another variant where the user could specify a name of their choice for the 
iterator, but in both cases this extra flexibility made the code a bit more 
verbose and was not that useful in practice. It would be easy to resurrect this 
flexibility if needed (it doesn't affect efficiency, of course).

Here's an example. At first, I wrote a revised version like this:

   Lisp_Object tail;
   FOR_EACH_TAIL (tail, list)
     if (EQ (XCAR (tail), elt))
       return true;

but this was annoying both because the user must declare 'tail', and because 
typically 'tail' should not survive the loop but the declaration forces it to 
survive. I wanted something more like this:

   FOR_EACH_TAIL (tail, list)
     if (EQ (XCAR (tail), elt))
       return true;

where the macro declares 'tail' to be local to the loop. Unfortunately there 
doesn't seem to be any way to that in portable C. So I settled for this:

   FOR_EACH_TAIL (list)
     if (EQ (XCAR (li.tail), elt))
       return true;

which is even shorter than what I wanted, albeit with an 'li.tail' that looks 
odd at least at first. Although we could easily change things to let the caller 
specify a name, like this:

   FOR_EACH_TAIL (li, list)
     if (EQ (XCAR (li.tail), elt))
       return true;

it's rare to need different names for iterators, so it's unclear that this extra 
complexity would be helpful.