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From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: acorallo@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
	mattias.engdegard@gmail.com, stefankangas@gmail.com
Subject: Drifting towards a statically typed Emacs Lisp.  [Was: Introducing 'safety' compilation parameter]
Date: Tue, 7 May 2024 16:07:58 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZjpR3hHfIBjjmb7d@ACM> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <86v83pahks.fsf@gnu.org>

Hello, Eli.

On Tue, May 07, 2024 at 16:15:47 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 7 May 2024 12:01:33 +0000
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
> >   monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, mattias.engdegard@gmail.com,
> >   stefankangas@gmail.com
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > I see this change as one more boil-the-frog-slowly step towards turning
> > Emacs Lisp into a statically typed language.

> Alan, please be kinder, even if you dislike very much suggestions of
> others.

No offence was intended.

> The above could have been easily rephrased as

>   Emacs Lisp should not be turned into a statically typed language.

> without losing any useful content, ....

Not really - what would have been lost is the equivalent  of ".... and I
see this process happening at the moment.".  The frog metaphor was an
economical way of phrasing this.  Again, I'm sorry it caused offence.

> .... including your strenuous objection to the change.

I see Emacs Lisp steadily drifting towards being statically typed, and I
don't think that's a good thing.  As far as I'm aware, there has been no
general agreement amongst Emacs developers for this (unless it's
happened as a side-thread in some thread without having an accurate
Subject:).

We currently have the prospect of lots of functions being cluttered up
with "type" declarations.  We already have meaningless (to a Lisp
programmer) things like:

    Inferred type: (function (&optional t t) t)                                                                            

appearing in prominent positions in doc strings.  Why?

If this is the way Emacs Lisp is to develop, can't we at least have an
open discussion about it and a positive decision taken, rather than
letting it "just happen"?  As is already clear, I see static typing in
Emacs Lisp, except, perhaps, on a very limited scale, as a Bad Thing.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).



  reply	other threads:[~2024-05-07 16:07 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2024-05-07 10:37 Introducing 'safety' compilation parameter Andrea Corallo
2024-05-07 12:01 ` Alan Mackenzie
2024-05-07 13:15   ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-07 16:07     ` Alan Mackenzie [this message]
2024-05-07 17:06       ` Drifting towards a statically typed Emacs Lisp. [Was: Introducing 'safety' compilation parameter] Andrea Corallo
2024-05-07 23:37         ` Emanuel Berg
2024-05-07 18:00       ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-08  0:14         ` Emanuel Berg
2024-05-07 23:29       ` Emanuel Berg
2024-05-09 23:52       ` Richard Stallman
2024-05-10  6:31         ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-07 16:37   ` Introducing 'safety' compilation parameter Tomas Hlavaty
2024-05-07 16:54   ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-07 23:42     ` Emanuel Berg
2024-05-07 14:56 ` Stefan Monnier
2024-05-07 16:13   ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10 17:58     ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-13  2:29       ` Stefan Monnier
2024-05-13 18:59         ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-13 21:12           ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-14  6:11             ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-09  8:40 ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-10  7:47   ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10 10:17     ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-10 11:42       ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10 15:10         ` Eli Zaretskii
2024-05-10 18:02   ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10 18:05     ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-09  9:19 ` Gerd Möllmann
2024-05-10  7:58   ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10  8:09     ` Gerd Möllmann
2024-05-10  8:19       ` Andrea Corallo
2024-05-10 14:00     ` Stefan Monnier

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