From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: "John Wiegley" <johnw@gnu.org>
Cc: michael_heerdegen@web.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Update of pcase docs for the elisp manual
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 20:41:00 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <838u3c18w3.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <m2fuxks2dd.fsf@newartisans.com> (message from John Wiegley on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 08:59:42 -0800)
> From: John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>
> Cc: Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 08:59:42 -0800
>
> - Is there any way we can get rid of the phrases QPattern and UPattern?
> There's decades of prior literature on pattern matching in functional
> languages, and none of them use "QPattern" and "UPattern". We're inventing
> terms that make no sense at all to newcomers, except for the single-letter
> correspondence with "quoted" and "unquoted". What if we just call them
> "quoted patterns" and "unquoted patterns", if that is what we mean?
The alternatives you propose are longer, which makes it harder to
produce palatable descriptions. And there's a long tradition of using
them in Emacs.
But I don't own the manual; if you want to get rid of those terms, go
ahead and make the change.
> I still vote for "literal" and "logical", since a literal pattern matches
> by literally being the same value as the input, while a logical pattern
> matches due to the logic of the pattern.
AFAIU, your division into logical and literal was different from the
division between UPatterns and QPatterns. That's why I didn't use
those terms.
> - The docs say "UPatterns are simpler, so we describe them first." Don't
> UPatterns represent the entire complexity of `pcase'?
On the implementation level, yes. But that's not really relevant for
the documentation (except that we really should say so and give an
example).
> How are they simpler?
They are to me. They use undecorated symbols, and don't require the
quote/unquote games. If that doesn't explain why they are simpler,
then I don't know how to explain it, but the gut feeling is very real.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-01-26 18:41 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 28+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <m2fuxq6pb0.fsf@newartisans.com>
[not found] ` <87d1stznc6.fsf@web.de>
[not found] ` <m2si1p8r31.fsf@newartisans.com>
[not found] ` <m2powt5w50.fsf@newartisans.com>
2016-01-23 11:17 ` Update of pcase docs for the elisp manual Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-24 4:40 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-24 14:33 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-24 23:17 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-25 16:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-26 1:40 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-26 15:38 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-26 16:23 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-25 14:22 ` Michael Heerdegen
2016-01-25 14:15 ` Michael Heerdegen
2016-01-25 16:33 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-28 18:37 ` Michael Heerdegen
2016-01-29 3:06 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-29 9:45 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-29 14:51 ` Michael Heerdegen
2016-01-26 16:59 ` John Wiegley
2016-01-26 18:10 ` Stefan Monnier
2016-01-26 18:41 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2016-01-26 19:35 ` John Wiegley
2016-01-26 20:28 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-29 1:28 ` John Wiegley
2016-01-29 8:30 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-29 13:39 ` Andy Moreton
2016-01-29 14:21 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-29 15:14 ` Andy Moreton
2016-01-29 15:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-01-26 19:58 ` Andy Moreton
2016-01-26 20:19 ` Eli Zaretskii
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