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

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Thu 30 Sep 2021 at 13:31, André A. Gomes <andremegafone@gmail.com> 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.

It is a problem.  It is a shame that it will break grep and search in
general (e.g. web), due to names not being unique anymore.

> Grep comes the world of Unix and its mantras.  But Lisp REPLs come
> from another world.

That is wrong.  I use Common Lisp and still need grep.

> 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.

Some eat soup with sticks.  Sure it can be the wrong tool for those
refusing to learn to work with that.