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).
next prev parent 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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