Re: Emacs Package Management

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> That's more or less what we've been doing.  Originally I strove very
> hard to keep Emacs itself small.  Many basic and obviously useful
> functions were not standardly available, but they were in CL.  Since
> then we have made a number of them standard, and we could certainly
> do this for more of them in the future when it seems best.
>
> But some of the CL facilities are overly complex.  And some,
> specifically setf and friends, are not implemented quite right in the
> Emacs context, which makes them ugly to include.

Some suggestions for core:

  * remove-if / delete-if / remove-if-not / delete-if-not
     (_without_ the CL keyword arguments)

    [These are very handy for filtering lists of values.  The keyword
     arguments are not very important, and keywordless core versions
     would be compatible with keyword-supporting cl.el versions in the
     same way that core `dolist' is compatible with cl.el `dolist']
    

  * mapcan

    [Useful for mapping when there isn't a 1-1 relationship between
    argument list elements and result list elements]


  * multiple-argument mapping (mapcar, mapc, etc) functions

    [Useful and obvious generalization of existing mapping functions;
     Gnus already contains its own implementation of a multiple-argument
     mapcar]


[I think all of these are simple and practical.]

-Miles

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