Re: Regexp bytecode disassembler

[Štěpán Němec]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 16:12:47 +0200
Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> It's unnecessarily verbose and most of that is just repetition, i.e.
>> noise, which makes it harder to read. It _begs_ to be rewritten with
>> (p)case. :-)
>
> In that case, it's the other way around IMO: using pcase here is like
> firing cannons at birds -- it's un-economical (a.k.a. "suboptimal").
>
> Please think about people who are not 100% at home with advanced
> macros such as pcase: they will have a harder time understanding what
> the code does.  This is especially relevant to this feature, since it
> is quite probable that it would have been used by someone working on
> the Emacs regex code, so Lisp proficiency may not be guaranteed.  That
> is one reason why I asked to have the code prominently commented and
> documented.

I am aware of that; I intentionally put the (p) in parentheses, and I
did say _some_ kind of case/switch instead of general conditional.

IMHO the complexity of `pcase' is completely transparent in this case:
it does what I believe anyone without any knowledge about the macro
would expect it to do just looking at it (and you can easily check the
expansion e.g. with M-x pp-macroexpand-last-sexp).

That said, there is always `cl-case', of course, as Drew suggested.

-- 
Štěpán