Re: Advantage using mapc over dolist

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

> I respect your preference and understand that you as pcase author would
> prefer it everywhere.  But whoever renamed case and ecase did not
> respect other peoples preferences and people are now forced to use that
> pcase monstrosity even in very simple cases.

I'm also the renamer of `case/ecase`, yes.  🙂

This was not done to discourage people's use of it, actually the
reverse.  Yes, I know it sounds counter intuitive, so let me explain:
Richard was strongly opposed to the use of the CL package because of its
"stepping" all over the ELisp namespace.  For years, this manifested
itself in the fact that use of CL within Emacs's own code was generally
shunned and tolerated only with (eval-when-compile (require 'cl)),
meaning that you could use CL only when it could be compiled away during
byte-compilation (by macro-expansion and/or inlining).  So you could use
`ecase` but not `some`.

While some people were happy because they consider that ELisp is better
off without those Common Lisp constructs, many others were annoyed, and
it imposed obstacles to the inclusion of some packages into Emacs.

Finally in Emacs-24.3, we reached a compromise which was to introduce
CL-Lib, which is like CL except all the functions/macros are prefixed
with "cl-".  By its nature as a compromise, everyone both lost and won
at the same time.

Note that if you really really hate using these extra three letters, you
can still (require 'cl).  It's deprecated and may be removed from Emacs in
some future release, but it's a very simple library so you can keep your
own copy (and we may even put it up on GNU ELPA anyway).


        Stefan