Re: Help sought understanding shorthands wrt modules/packages

["Gerd Möllmann" <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>]

Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 7:28 AM Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>  But let me add, as notorious trouble-maker, that shorthands consist of 
>  problems only.  The fact that no-one seems to want to ask why I think 
>  that, I interpret as meaning that this is a well-known fact :-).
>
> Please elaborate.

Hi Juanma, glad you asked :-).

The basic problem is that the shorthands are 100% ephemeral, and are
not managed in any way.

Example from the Info manual

     ;; read-symbol-shorthands: (("snu-" . "some-nice-string-utils-"))

The "snu-" definition is not recorded anywhere, nothing is preventing
someone else from also using "snu-", or warning about it.  You can't
find out that "snu-" was used to read it from looking at a symbol, or if
an abbreviation was used at all, which is in my eyes unlispy, because it
allows no introspection.

Add to that that read-file-names can be bound locally, by developers and
users, as they see fit (file-local, buffer-local, dynamically).  Now we
have a whole new type of possible conflicts, in addition to what we
already have.

And good look with xref, grep and alike.

Does that make sense?

>  Let's see.  I hope that ideology doesn't play a role in Emacs, and 
>  Richard simply didn't have the necessary information to change his mind.
>
> Ideology was one motivating factor to choose Bazar and not git, back then. 

Ok, that's true.

Although, I don't really see how GNU has any stakes in Lisp standards.
Maybe with the Guile thing that cropped up 20 years ago, but I'd hope
that that's no longer an issue.

But who knows?  Hm, thinking of this--wouldn't it be a good idea to
integrate ECL with Emacs?  Hm :-).