Re: [ELPA] New package: dict

[Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:

> Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com> writes:
>
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>>
>>>> From: Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>
>>>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>>> Date: Fri, 12 May 2023 16:17:53 +0300
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts/ideas?
>>>
>>> How about adding to dictionary.el a customizable function that
>>> dictionary-search would call instead of its default operation?
>>
>> Thanks, this would be a good way to expose the different behavior that I
>> want to add.  However, my difficulty lies elsewhere.  The issue I
>> brought up in my previous message is with implementing this behavior
>> without introducing unnecessary code duplication to dictionary.el.
>>
>> In short, we need two things: a way to obtain a word's definition and a
>> way to obtain dictionary matches given some input (for completion).
>> dictionary.el does these things already, but in way that's too coupled
>> with its user interface to admit reuse for my purposes.  So the question
>> is whether to add the needed stuff from Dict to dictionary.el and accept
>> some code duplication, or try to refactor the parts of dictionary.el
>> that communicate with the dictionary server to provide a cleaner API.
>
> Maybe you can rewrite the higher-level code in dictionary.el to depend
> on the lower-level code in dict.el (while combining them into one file).

That'd definitely make it easier to integrate new functionality, but I
think it would be quite hard to do without risking breaking existing
dictionary.el features.  For now I avoided making extensive changes.

--
Best,

Eshel