Re: Declaring Lisp function types

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com>
> Cc: acorallo@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org, stefankangas@gmail.com
> Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2024 15:56:30 +0100
> 
> On Sat 16 Mar 2024 at 16:06, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Yes, but who would search for names that are symbols
> > of a programming language?
> 
> I do search for lisp symbols all the time.
> Do you not search for lisp symbols?
> 
> > If you search for "ptrdiff_t" or even "__attribute__", you get gobs of
> > hits.
> 
> And?

Searching for "ptrdiff_t" just in the src directory brings more than
3500 hits.  Does it sound like practical to you?  Who'd be able to
review such a voluminous output to find what you are after?

> Now imagine if "ptrdiff_t" was called "function" instead.

I don't really see the difference.

Like I said: searching for symbols of a programming language is not a
good idea.  It is not efficient, and thus not useful.  So this aspect
is simply not relevant to the issue at hand.

> > Same if you search for "defun" or "defmac".
> 
> defun and defmacro are great symbol names.
> Specific, unique and as a bonus short.

Maybe if you search the text of a book, or sources of a program
written in a language other than Lisp.  Otherwise once again, you get
gobs of hits that are not relevant to what you are looking for.

So the point you are trying to make, namely, that bad names bring too
many hits, is not convincing, because any symbol we choose will have
the same problem.

> > This is simply not a good idea, and the fact that we choose this or
> > that name for a type declaration will never help you, as long as many
> > instances use that declaration.
> 
> The focus is "Declaring Lisp function types".  If it had a good symbol
> name, I could find relevant places without false positives.

Both 'function' and 'type' (and several similar ones) are good symbol
names for that.  And if you disagree, let's agree to disagree, because
it doesn't sound like there's a sign of any agreement or compromise in
sight.