Re: Emacs regexp scan (Sep 29)

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Thanks, I installed the attached patch, which I hope fixes all the bugs 
>> and style glitches uncovered by that scan, along with some other style 
>> glitches I noticed in the neighborhood.
>
> I question the need for "fixing" those "style glitches" (and even the
> very existence of a "style glitch", which sounds like a contradiction
> of terms to me).

What's confusing to me is why regexps in particular are being subjected
to these stylistic rewrites.  There's a bunch of styles being used in
Emacs Lisp code, but we avoid doing mass fixups (according to one
preference or another) of working code, because non-functional code
churn makes maintenance more difficult.

I mean, I prefer

(when foo
  (do-something))

over

(if foo
    (do-something))

or

(and foo (do-something))

but I hope that nobody would do a mass-rewrite of the Emacs code base
to prefer `when' here, because it'd make diving into the history of the
code a nightmare.

So what's so special about regexps that "[-+]" has to be mass-rewritten
as "[+-]"?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no