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

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, André.

On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 13:31:34 +0300, André A. Gomes wrote:
> 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.

That is a very negative and unhelpful thing to say.  Do you have the
requisite background to say it?  What precisely would you use in place
of grep, which is a powerful, easily learnt, fast, universal tool?

My experience is that grep is an essential tool for Emacs maintenance.

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

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).