Re: Decoded time accessors

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 2019-07-07 17:43, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> We've coped now with (nth 8 state) (for the starting position of a
> string or comment) for decades now without any problems.  The sort of
> "readability hack" proposed, as it is steadily proliferated, makes the
> entry barrier for new Elisp programmers steadily higher.  To use it is
> one extra thing which has to be learned, or looked up.

FWIW, I disagree; I find that these accessor functions actually help.  And I think I count as fairly new, since I've been writing ELisp for just 5 years. 

The nice part about these accessor functions is that I only have to look them up once (and often not even once, since the name gives a precise enough idea of what they do).  But after 5 years, I still can't remember what each part of syntax-ppss means (and I end up defining my own aliases in each new package).

Besides, if I want detailed documentation, having to click on one more link to get to the docstring of file-attributes really isn't much of a problem, as far as I'm concerned.  And if a piece of code does (nth 3 attrs), how am I supposed to know that I have to look at the documentation of file-attributes to know what is in attrs?  If attrs is an argument of the current function I need to read the docstring, and if there isn't one or it doesn't say then I have to find the callers.  That's a lot harder than if the code used an accessor function on attrs.

Clément.