Re: pcase defuns

[Andrew Hyatt <ahyatt@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 11:15 PM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> 
wrote: 

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider 
> ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all 
> enemies,     ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow 
> Snowden's example. ]]] 
> 
> The idea of defining a function in pieces, scattered around one 
> or more files, is attractive as regards writing them.  But it 
> creates an inconvenience for subsequent maintenance by other 
> people. 
> 
> The first thing you're likely to do when you see a call to a 
> function you don't know about is to find its definition.  For a 
> piecewise-defined function, "the" definition doesn't exist.  It 
> has a number of partial definitions, scattered around one file 
> or perhaps multiple files. 
> 
> If you think it is helpful for clarity to put the code for 
> handling various cases in various places in the file, no new 
> construct is needed for that.  You can define a function for 
> handling each case, and put its definition in the place you want 
> it.  Then define one overall function (you can think of it as 
> "generic") which detects the cases and calls those. 
> 
> This works with our tools. 
> 
> Let's contrast this with generic functions. 
> 
> A generic function has a single central definition which 
> describes how to call it.  It is easy to find that. 
> 
> Finding the definitions of all the methods may be difficult. 
> You may need to grep for them. 
> 
> Calling the generic function selects a method by data types, and 
> you can generally tell, for given arguments, what data types 
> they have.  You can probably tell that one method is the right 
> one without seeing all the others and comparing them. 
> 
> Thus, generic functions cause one kind of inconvenience for 
> studying a program, but avoids the other kinds. 
> 
> Let's not add any constructs that increase the level of 
> complexity of genericness beyond this. 

These are all good points, thanks.

I agree that just implementing everything in a function is 
reasonable.  For that, just using pcase seems good enough, 
although it might be interesting to have a very different way of 
writing a function such as

(pcase-defun mytest
  "Demonstrates a way of writing defuns via pcase matching."
  ((a b _) "a b match")
  (`(c ,v _) (format "c %s match" v)))

Not sure if I like this syntax, it does seem to lend itself to the 
idea of a pcase-centric way of programming, but it's also a bit 
odd, and doesn't seem to buy much. However, it does at least 
answer the objections raised to my initial proposal. Of course, so 
does not doing anything.

>
>
> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)