From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master) Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:38:02 -0400 Message-ID: References: <16338bdc2497fc51c6fb6d54ab370bfb@webmail.orcon.net.nz> <831r59kyhf.fsf@gnu.org> <834ka4k15m.fsf@gnu.org> <83y27gijmz.fsf@gnu.org> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:116.202.254.214"; logging-data="26392"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" Cc: acm@muc.de, eliz@gnu.org, joaotavora@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Phil Sainty Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sat Oct 02 00:39:52 2021 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1mWRC4-0006gd-63 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:39:52 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:42726 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mWRC2-0000Ro-4K for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:39:50 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:35450) by lists.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mWRAJ-0007FI-8T for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:38:03 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:33798) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mWRAI-0005Ov-Oe; Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:38:02 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mWRAI-00014h-JF; Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:38:02 -0400 In-Reply-To: (message from Phil Sainty on Fri, 01 Oct 2021 01:23:48 +1300) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:276016 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > The first use-case is to do with the "s" library, and finding > a way to rename all of that code with a longer prefix without > requiring other libraries currently requiring "s" to change... Not solely with the `s' library; there are a few others. But basically I think you are right about this. And this is indeed the main intended use in Emacs itself. > The second use-case, and the one I think will prove to be FAR > more common if this goes ahead, is this: Some people simply want > to read and write shorter symbol names in their code. I would not object to making rules about naming or usage conventions for the shorter names, in the second use-case. We can't follow those conventions for the first use-case. They would not work. But it is ok to treat the two use-cases differently. > Instead, we would need two things: > 1. A way of displaying long symbols in the desired short form, > such that the buffer contains the actual symbol, but the > user sees the short symbol (i.e. some kind of replacing > display). > 2. Something analogous to abbrev which recognises when someone > starts typing a symbol with one of the configured short > prefixes, and expands it to be the full name (but per (1) > visually displayed as the short form that they typed). I think #2 might be a good idea, but #1 would lead to horrible confusion. If the screen does not match the buffer, that is chaos. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)