On Sat, May 2, 2020, 22:14 Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:

> On 1991-07-25, Jim Blandy introduced the alias `search-forward-regexp'
> for `re-search-forward'.  Why?  Lost in the mists of time.  Possibly for
> the same reasons people are advancing now - make all the search functions
> begin with "search-" for supposed easier searching (of their names).  In
> master we currently have 3534 occurences of re-search-forward and 134 of
> search-forward-regexp.  Would anybody here argue that Emacs is the better
> for these 134 alternatively named function calls?  I'd say it was a
> mistake, and there is nothing positive to offset the confusion.


Or `delete-backward-char' and its alias `backward-delete-char'.  We have,
> respectively, 5 and 36 uses.  To me, this is just confusion, whatever the
> original reason was for these aliases.
>
> I say we shouldn't add to such confusion.
>

Very good historic points. I hate these aliases, never know which to pick.
Every second gained in supposed discoverability is crushingly offset later
on by a thousand seconds of second-guessing and doubt over which version to
prefer. It's a really bad deal. Shall I try to be modern, or maintain
consistency with this program? I have plenty of those doubts with much more
important stuff already (iterative/recursive, functional/imperative, etc,
etc) I don't need new ones about naming. What a waste of time.

João

>