Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[André A . Gomes]

Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:

> A simple example: suppose you want to check which ELPA package
> activates tab-bar-mode.  That's easy to do with "grep -R tab-bar-mode"
> in a clone of the ELPA repository.  With symbol prefix renaming, a
> package author might decide to add ("tb-" . "tab-bar-") in the
> shorthands of the package, and "grep -R tab-bar-mode" will not show
> anything.  Likewise for tag systems, the symbols that are recorded
> will possibly be different in each package, and a search for
> tab-bar-mode will not return occurrences of tb-mode.

I don't think this is a problem.  Grep comes the world of Unix and its
mantras.  But Lisp REPLs come from another world.

Using grep and tag systems to reason about a Lisp program is like eating
soup with a fork.  You can do it, but it's the wrong tool.


--
André A. Gomes
"Free Thought, Free World"