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Re: cc-langs.el


From: Martin Stjernholm
Subject: Re: cc-langs.el
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 15:41:52 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.090016 (Oort Gnus v0.16) Emacs/20.7 (gnu/linux)

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

> [CL] functions are not a part of the Emacs Lisp namespace.
> (And I don't want to add them and make the Lisp manual much bigger.)

I gather your reasoning is: They don't have a namespace prefix and
hence they are in the Emacs Lisp namespace, and all functions in the
Emacs Lisp namespace must be documented in the elisp manual.

Considering the complexity of many elisp applications there's clearly
a lack of basic utility functions in the elisp core, specifically
functions to operate on the built-in data types, e.g. the map, search
and replace functions in the CL package. There are many severe
drawbacks when every package with the need have to avoid or
reimplement them. Those drawbacks are so basic that I don't think I
have to elaborate on that.

So why shouldn't Emacs provide that functionality? Because of the size
of the manual? That's imho an odd priority, especially considering
that the navigational aids provided by Info and other browsing tools
easily can handle documentation of at least ten times the size of the
elisp manual.


Regarding the issue that Miles Bader raised: I don't request that the
entire CL library is "blessed"; I'm only talking about the functions
that operate on data, i.e. the things in cl-extra.el, cl-seq.el and
most of cl.el. Afaik they do their job well (or can at least be fixed
to do it well, as there aren't any basic design issues that they try
to cover up). The other more questionable stuff could very well remain
deprecated.




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