Re: Declaring Lisp function types

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > I worry that these declarations will become frequent, even pervasive,
  > and then effectively compulsory.  Then we won't have Lisp any more,
  > we'll have something more like C.

  > I think somebody said somewhere that the declarations will be
  > "voluntary", but things that start off voluntary have a nasty habit of
  > first becoming pervasive, then all but universal, and then compulsory.

That is my concern as well.  If we let native compilation
lure us down the path of changing the Emacs Lisp language
so as to make native-compiled code faster, there is almost
no limit to how much time we could put into it.  There are
always things we could do to keep optimizing some cases.

This will tend to draw effort away from other sorts of improements in
GNU Emacs.   We should decline to go down that path.

As long as we avoid that alteration of priorities, and use this
information about function argument types and likely value types only
as a kind of documentation for users, there is no reason not to
improve the way we store it and how users can access it.


-- 
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)