Re: moving more cl seq/mapping support into core

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Richard Stallman writes:
>
>  > The fact that many programmers use cl.el is not conclusive.  Those
>  > programmers won't use cl names for anything else -- others might.
>
> XEmacs has been dumping cl for at least a decade, with no complaints I
> can recall.  FWIW YMMV

My main complaint is that I usually try fixing comprehension problems by
reading the source.

cl's existing DOC strings are often semiobfuscate, requiring a certain
degree of "common Lisp" thinkage in order to make sense of.  The cl code
itself is more or less completely inscrutable.  Partly because of its
nature of macro expansion, partly because of coding techniques/styles
and internals that are neither explained with code comments nor
self-explaining.

It does not tie in nicely with Emacs Lisp and promotes a programming
style that does not map straightforwardly to the Lisp machine and makes
debugging and streamlining haphazard.

My personal gut feeling would be to _first_ give Emacs well-working
lexical binding.  Then more or less reimplement cl from scratch.  If
things like keyword parsing would profit from supporting C functions,
create those functions instead of fiddling with macros all around.  Make
sure that the bytecode has everything to support cl sanely rather than
as a clever afterthought.

-- 
David Kastrup