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

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz> writes:

> The first use-case is to do with the "s" library, and finding
> a way to rename all of that code with a longer prefix without
> requiring other libraries currently requiring "s" to change
> much.  I'm still dubious that this is worth doing; but I must
> acknowledge that if it *is* to be supported, then it does indeed
> mean providing some way to translate "s-" symbols to their
> longer names.

Yes, that's the implicit intended use case, but it's not spelled out
anywhere.

> The second use-case, and the one I think will prove to be FAR
> more common if this goes ahead, is this: Some people simply want
> to read and write shorter symbol names in their code.

Yes, if we had a more ergonomic syntax for this, then a large portion of
people would be writing

(require 'gnus-summary :as x)
(require 'xref :as gs)

etc etc, since this is what they do in many modern languages (and I'm
not much fan of it there, either).  But since the syntax is the really
awkward

;; Local Variables:
;; elisp-shorthands: (("t-" . "my-tricks-")
;;                    ("sns-" . "some-nice-string-utils-"))
;; End:

it'll hopefully be less appealing to people.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no