Re: [ELPA] New package: dict

[Stephen Leake]

Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> From: Eshel Yaron <me@eshelyaron.com>
>>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> Date: Fri, 12 May 2023 16:17:53 +0300
>>>
>>> Any thoughts/ideas?
>>
>> How about adding to dictionary.el a customizable function that
>> dictionary-search would call instead of its default operation?
>
> Thanks, this would be a good way to expose the different behavior that I
> want to add.  However, my difficulty lies elsewhere.  The issue I
> brought up in my previous message is with implementing this behavior
> without introducing unnecessary code duplication to dictionary.el.
>
> In short, we need two things: a way to obtain a word's definition and a
> way to obtain dictionary matches given some input (for completion).
> dictionary.el does these things already, but in way that's too coupled
> with its user interface to admit reuse for my purposes.  So the question
> is whether to add the needed stuff from Dict to dictionary.el and accept
> some code duplication, or try to refactor the parts of dictionary.el
> that communicate with the dictionary server to provide a cleaner API.

Maybe you can rewrite the higher-level code in dictionary.el to depend
on the lower-level code in dict.el (while combining them into one file).
-- 
-- Stephe