Re: Should `position' be implemented in Emacs core and preloaded?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> What i meant is that it would be nice if people could use that kind of
> useful functions without face resistances.  I saw before
> in this list people who wanted to use a function from cl-lib or seq.el,
> and they received objections because that would force that file to
> require such lib.

Normally such resistance only appears when it would require preloading
seq or cl-lib (i.e. when it's used by a file which is itself preloaded).

I think preloading seq.el would be OK under the following conditions:
- seq.el is changed so as not to require cl-lib (that's mostly
  a question of moving shared code between the two libs so that it's in
  seq.el instead of in cl-lib, so it shouldn't be too difficult).
- one of the preloaded files really benefits from seq.el.

>> Also, FWIW, I don't see many uses of these cl/seq-position functions
>> in Emacs, so I'm not sure how important they are, really.
> I suspect that one important reason to not appear widely is exactly
> that in order to use them we need to require the lib to use it.

You might be right.  I guess there's also the fact that on singly-linked
lists, using seq-position is rarely the best way (in terms of
efficiency) to get the job done.


        Stefan