Re: map.el and naming

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > > Please, let's not go there.
 > 
 > You must have missed the "Think of" part of my answer.  OO is not
 > just a bunch of programming language semantics, but is also a way
 > to think about and design programs.

I don't see how "Think of" makes a difference.  We're not talking
about designing programs here, we're talking about designing
languages, specifically Emacs Lisp.  The question is how much
object-orientation of Emacs Lisp primitive types can we implement in
Lisp, and the answer AFAICS is "no more than we already have".

In any case, my main point was that I don't see why seq.el and map.el,
with their pseudo-namespace prefixes, are a good idea for Emacs Lisp.
Sure, if there are useful new operations, add them; if they can be
polymorphic with mnemonic names, better yet.  But AFAICS most of the
interesting polymorphism is already available through functions like
nth.  There's a reason why setnth doesn't exist, you know.  And
mnemonic synonyms (first, rest, ...) are common already.  (Similarly,
there's a reason why rest isn't polymorphic over arrays and strings.)

A wholesale cleanup isn't going to be possible without the kind of
effort required to change the underlying Lisp engine to a Scheme or
Common Lisp implementation.  So AFAICS these pseudo-namespaces are not
going to improve the language.