Re: A protest against pcase, pcase-let, pcase-let*

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> Can we please have a moratorium on the use of pcase, etc.?  Their use is
> gradually proliferating through Emacs, yet they are not documented.
>
> OK, maybe pcase itself has a page in the elisp manual, but this page is
> very difficult to understand, certainly for me.  I have attempted quite
> a lot of times to make sense of it, and failed.
>
> There are two possibilities here: (i) the page is difficult because
> pcase is itself difficult.  In this case we should stop using pcase and
> systematically remove it from Emacs source.  (ii) The page is difficult
> because it is not well written.  In this case it should be improved.
> Personally, I think (ii) is more likely to be true than (i).


The documentation is, I think, written from the perspective of someone
who knows what this sort of pattern-matching does already. The elisp
manual is, of course, a manual rather than a tutorial and the pcase
documentation is particularly not an easy read.

The emacs-wiki has tons of examples, which is much easier to understand
I think!

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PatternMatching