Re: [External] : Re: Shrinking the C core

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Mon 11 Sep 2023 at 16:10, João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> wrote:
> This makes them very easy to remember and makes using e.g. CL's SORT
> much more practical than Emacs Lisp 'sort'.

not really, it seems that CL:SORT is a bad example

the CL spec defines sort like this:

   sort sequence predicate &key key => sorted-sequence
   stable-sort sequence predicate &key key => sorted-sequence

(btw why two functions and not extra stablep keyword argument?)

it could have been defined as:

   sort sequence predicate &optional key => sorted-sequence
   stable-sort sequence predicate &optional key => sorted-sequence

and the same could be done in elisp which would be backwards compatible

> Let's look at a traditional Elisp macro define-minor-mode.

the usual CL argument list does not seem to be able to express arguments
of such shape

it looks like whoever extended the original argument list did it
"weirdly" using custom ad-hoc single-use argument list parser.

> are maintenance hazards, the macro now accepts keyword arguments

in CL, the arguments would normally be in a list before body, something
like

   (define-minor-mode MODE ([KEYWORD VAL ... ]) [DOC] &rest BODY)