Re: Declaring Lisp function types

[Lele Gaifax <lele@metapensiero.it>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 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.

I think Tomas just meant to say that, even if looking for "ptrdiff_t"
brings thousands of hits, you can be pretty confident that almost all of
them are related to a very particular kind of data, the same cannot be
said when looking for a much more generic term such as "function".

Not sure what kind of searches one would do on the keywords/symbols used
in a function declaration (and thus, strictly in this thread's topic),
but surely I find your assertion that

> searching for symbols of a programming language is not a
> good idea. It is not efficient, and thus not useful.

is a bit too broad: it's not that rare (or useless) to search and
replace all "ptrdiff_t" instance with something else.

That said, I think that's not reasonable to always require very specific
terms just to make it simpler to search for them: on one hand, we know
that "naming things" is very difficult, OTOH there a possibly better
approaches to look for terms in a specific context ("syntax aware
grep"[1] comes to mind).

ciao, lele.

[1] https://github.com/osa1/sg
-- 
nickname: Lele Gaifax | Quando vivrò di quello che ho pensato ieri
real: Emanuele Gaifas | comincerò ad aver paura di chi mi copia.
lele@metapensiero.it  |                 -- Fortunato Depero, 1929.