Re: [ELPA] New package: dict

[Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>]

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.


-- 
Best,

Eshel