Re: [External] : Re: Shrinking the C core

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Arthur Miller wrote:

> Yes indeed; and I agree with what you wrote in your longer
> second mail about that. They do lessen the need for more
> functions which means less API surface to document and
> potentially lookup and learn. Isn't a good example that
> window functions that I wanted to make into same once in the
> context of help/info patch? I don't remember which it were
> tbh :). Something with selecting window on just current
> frame or all frames or something like that.

I think, in general and ranked from best to worse,

1. Many functions, all with few arguments
2. One function with not-that-many optional arguments
3. One function with keyword arguments
4. One function with too many optional arguments

Documentation is not a problem for case 1 since small
functions with clear names and few arguments typically
requires just 1~3 lines of documentation.

This documentation is also easy to browse, you won't have to
navigate the help buffer or search it for what an argument or
keyword does, written far below somewhere in the text.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal