Re: Thoughts on getting correct line numbers in the byte compiler's warning messages

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Stefan and Eli.

A snag.....

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 14:08:43 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

[ .... ]

> One thing we'd need to watch out for is using equal, not eq, when we
> compare symbols.  (eq 'foo #<symbol foo with position 73>) will surely
> be nil, but (equal ....) would be t.  Same with member and memq.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to work.  There will be macros which do
things like:

    (cond ((eq (car form) 'bar) ....) .....)

Here, (car form) is going to be #<symbol bar at 42>, so the eq is going
to return nil.

The only way out of this I can see at the moment is to amend eq (and
memq, assq, delq, ....) so that it recognises a symbol with position as
being eq to the bare symbol.

At least when the flag variable symbols-with-pos-enabled is currently
non-nil.  At the implementation level, when that variable is nil (i.e.
for normal running), there would be a cost of one comparison of an
in-cache variable with zero on each eq operation which returns nil.

This isn't pretty.  If this modification of eq, memq, .... is too much
to take, then I think the current approach is doomed to failure.

What do you think?

[ .... ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).