Re: A read-based grep-like for symbols (el-search?) (was Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master))

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 01.10.2021 16:15, João Távora wrote:
> Language design never has been held back by the particular assumptions
> of a search tool, popular and ubiquitous as it may be.

Certain language designers intentionally limit the language's power due 
to usability considerations, keeping in mind their audience.

Speaking of shorthands, if only the "local" part of every symbol's name 
was something reliable (as is often the case in module/package systems 
out there), we could still implement the search for references using 
Grep fairly efficiently: you Grep across the files for the local name, 
and then post-filter the references by looking at the end of the file.

If that approach is not feasible, we're limited to searching for the 
instances of 'require' forms (when the symbol/function can be mapped to 
a package name) and then searching inside every such file on the second 
pass.

read-ing the contents of every Lisp file is pretty expensive, in comparison.