bug#43961: read carefully: dired-file-name-at-point vs dired-filename-at-point

[Boruch Baum]

On 2020-10-13 12:58, Arthur Miller wrote:
> ...
> + file-name-directory and directory-file-name,

Another excellent example that I always find confusing, even after much
dired programming.

> dired-filename-at-point is supposed to return a filename closest to the
> point, according to docs. For me it didn't work at all.

I seems to not have been as well-maintained as its sister function,
possibly because they've been in separate files and the maintainer
forgot about one. One of its bugs is that it truncates file names at the
first embedded space.

> But I mostly disliked the name. Why are there two almost identical name
> for different functionality?

So annoying, and not limited to dired. I recently posted another in bug
report 43294 [1]. It's been languishing for ~6 weeks without a decision
for action, so your vote might be helpful there.

> I have seen also discussion about string-replace and replace-string, can
> we plase not? For the reason above. And for the new APIs added, please
> don't use naming patterns like word1-word2 and word2-word1 or similar
> where same words are used just with some slight variation.

+1

Also, match-string and string-match. IMO, match-string should be aliased
and to something like 'match-result' and deprecate the original name
with a long-horizon EOL to account for its ubiquity. @Lars: Should I
open a bug report separately for this?

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2020-09/msg00872.html

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