Re: CL package serious deficiencies

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     RMS> * CL is ugly.  It is not well integrated with the rest of Emacs Lisp.
>
>     The second part seems to me to be a circular argument.  It could be
>     better integrated; but it will not be as long as it is not acceptable.
>
> Maybe we are miscommunicating.  The ugliness I am talking about is in
> the specs of these functions, not the implementation.  The specs of
> the CL functions don't fit in well with Emacs Lisp.  This isn't
> something that could be fixed with more work on the code.

Ugliness is a more normative than descriptive word.

I assume you are referring the use of keyword arguments in the CL
functions, as (to my knowledge) keyword arguments were consciously
excluded from elisp and are not used elsewhere.

Assuming the above is correct and there are to be no keyword arguments
in core elisp functions, then Emacs is in an undesirable position in
which core functionality (e.g., `reduce' and `remove-if') is not
provided by default, and the common names for such functionality is
reserved for functions which will never be included in the core, so it
doesn't seem likely that acceptable versions of such functions could
ever be included into elisp.

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/