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: A read-based grep-like for symbols (el-search?) (was Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)) Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:21:04 -0400 Message-ID: References: <25d8d72022b571db5291@heytings.org> <87h7e2xsl5.fsf@gmail.com> <25d8d72022e1ea7ed022@heytings.org> <87fstl7lzw.fsf@web.de> <87a6jt7ilx.fsf@web.de> <87fstlzlaq.fsf@gmail.com> <20211001070242.GC16352@tuxteam.de> 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="28631"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" Cc: tomas@tuxteam.de, dgutov@yandex.ru, joaotavora@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Gregory Heytings Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Fri Oct 08 00:28:14 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 1mYbs3-00078X-Qv for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Fri, 08 Oct 2021 00:28:11 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:57920 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mYbs2-00021k-NN for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:28:10 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:57522) by lists.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mYblC-00065D-SH for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:21:06 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:50676) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mYblB-00028l-GQ; Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:21:05 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1mYblA-00073A-V1; Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:21:05 -0400 In-Reply-To: (message from Gregory Heytings on Sun, 03 Oct 2021 21:17:26 +0000) 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:276522 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. ]]] For reference, these are the two use-cases: > > * Creating longer real names to avoid collisions. In this kind of case > > the package that you load creates shorthands for itself, which rename > > its symbols to longer names that won't conflict. This is what we will > > do with s.el. > > > > * Creating shorter names for convenience. In this kind of case, one Lisp > > file would create shorthand prefixes for code in other files. These > > prefixes might really be shorter than the symbols' documented name. You wrote: > (1) the need for a solution to the first use case is essentially a > consequence of the absence of a solution to the second use case (IOW, a > few library authors have chosen to use short prefixes in their libraries > to make them more appealing to use), It might be true that the existence _in the past_ of a system for shortening the names of symbols in another package would have avoided making libraries whose own name prefixes are "s-" and "-". We can't be sure. It does not follow that adding such a system now would eliminate the problem that those short prefixes cause. I don't think it would. People have proposed conventions to use particular punctuation characters to indicate a shortened prefix -- such as `s:', perhaps. And maybe that's what we should do. But programs that do (require 's) don't start those symbols with `s:'. They start them with `s-'. > (4) a solution to the first use case cannot be a long term solution, We need a long term solution, and that's what this is intended to be. It is a good solution because it avoids the need to convince hundreds, perhaps thousands, of library authors that we are not in communication with to change the way they write calls to Magnars's libraries. -- 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)