Re: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs

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

>>> *Any* solution that frees developers from spelling all symbols in full
>>> will have that disadvantage.
>> That's right.
> So what?  There are definitely offsetting benefits.  Or are you saying M-x
> grep is our top priority now?

I'm ambivalent on this issue, so take my word as an summary of my
understanding of the last discussion about it.

In other words, any improvement that tries to reduce the redundancy in
identifiers will require corresponding improvement in our tools to infer
the now-implicit information.

So we could bite the bullet and hope that someone will step up to the
plate and improve CEDET (or equivalent) to make up the difference.
Or we can sit here and wait for CEDET to improve first.
Or we can decide that this redundancy is really not that costly compared
to the benefits of being able to use dumb tools rather than being
dependent on more sophisticated packages.

When you said:

   That's a terrible idea. It makes it much harder to reason about the
   correct operation of programs, since now it makes it virtually
   impossible to implement find-definition functionality without lots of
   type inference.

you put your finger on the issue, indeed.  Using namespaces/modules
rather than Smalltalk-style objects would undoubtedly require
significantly less sophisticated analysis, but the same kind of tradeoff
is at play.

So for now, I insist on `gen-next' and `cl-flet'.  Even if it makes me
unpopular.

And note that I decided `cl-setf' was important/popular/frequent enough
to deserve to be promoted to `setf', and the same could happen at some
point to `gen-next' or `cl-flet'.


        Stefan