Re: [PATCH] Desktop mode saves mark-ring too verbosely

[Kelly Dean <kelly@prtime.org>]

Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>> +(defvar desktop-var-serdes-funs
[snip]
> aren’t “serialization” and “deserialization” often
> referred to as “writing” and “reading” in the dialects of Lisp?

Yes, but I intentionally avoided those terms because this table is for functions that don't necessarily just print and read in the normal Lisp sense. E.g. mark-ring contains markers, and a marker contains both a position and a reference to the relevant buffer, so simply printing mark-ring in the Lisp sense would involve printing both the positions and the buffer references, but its serializer function in this table outputs only the positions. The entire point of my patch is to avoid the Lisp sense of printing, because printing the buffer references is far too verbose.

> It doesn’t look like a common abbreviation,

It's a common abbreviation for parallel↔serial conversion circuits, which are reasonably analogous to functions that convert program data to/from a text stream. And circuitry is a domain for which it's common to share terminology with software.

> so I guess
> “serializer, deserializer” should rather be spelled in full.

This table is something that only programmers, not users, will need to understand or modify, so using a technical abbreviation isn't a problem. Emacs already has abbreviated names such as ⌜fboundp⌝ and ⌜fmakunbound⌝ for programmer-only things, instead of ⌜function-bound-predicate⌝ and ⌜function-make-unbound⌝. So if anything, ⌜funs⌝ isn't abbreviated _enough_. ;-)

Spelling out ⌜desktop-variable-serialization-deserialization-functions⌝ would be ironic, considering the purpose of my patch.

BTW, you quoted only me, but you CCed only Stefan. I almost missed your message, until I checked the mailing list.