Re: Proper namespaces in Elisp

["João Távora" <joaotavora@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 4:10 AM Vladimir Sedach <vas@oneofus.la> wrote:
> João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:
> > All namespacing in all languages systems "break" grep if
> > you give grep a volatile namespace qualifier.  This just comes
> > with the namespacing.
> That is not true. A reference like NAMESPACE:SYMBOL makes it obvious
> that you should search for SYMBOL. This is why GNU etags works

I was talking about grep. And if you teach etags about ":" you can
teach it about shorthands, too.   Again this comes with the problem,
I don't think it's even worth discussing.

It's like hunger. The daily problem "hunger" is not solved by "eating".
It's solved by dying, I presume.  That sucks, unless you're a zombie
in which case you're still hungry.

> That is true. I am not advocating for overlays/abbrev. I am pointing
> out that it gets you a lot of the same benefits as the proposed
> system, while being far less intrusive.

Heh, sounds a lot like advocacy to me. Anyway, it's hideous, IMHO.
Even if you think that's just taste (it might be), the main reason
I'm not interested in discussing it is that it doesn't solve the s.el, f.el,
dash.el situation at all, because it's not a namespacing system.

> A question related to isearch: how would the proposed system work
> with apropos?

The actual symbol is always the longhand version.

> I am sorry, I don't follow. The proposal is for a file-local setting
> that requires magic comments. Why wouldn't package authors be
> required to change their code

We can try to guess notable cases like s.el if they use the cookie
;; Package-Requires or even by watching the "require" calls.
Anyway, even if we don't do that, adding a couple of lines
in a backward-compatible way is infinitely better than renaming
a zillion calls.

Bye,
João