Re: Why shouldn't we have a #if .... #else .... #endif construct in Emacs Lisp?

[Richard Stallman]

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  > >   > >       (defadvice .....))

  > >   > However, when evaluating the containing defun/defmacro rather than 
byte
  > >   > compiling it, the irritating warning message will appear with the 
e-w-c
  > >   > strategem, but not with hash-if.  ;-)

  > > How about making the byte compiler recognize the construct
 
  > >  (if (< emacs-major-version NUMBER) ...)

  > > and do this optimization on it?

  > > I think that will DTRT when compiled and when interpreted,
  > > and it won't require changes in the code of the programs that use it.

People peopose to handle conditions about Emacs version numbers in
a more optimized way.  I propsed a simple syntax for that.
Isn't it better>

  > The conditions we want to test are sometimes/frequently expressed in
  > terms of the (non-)existence of variables, etc.  It would be
  > inconvenient for package maintainers to have to determine "critical"
  > Emacs version numbers to use.

I don't dollow you, Haveb't we been talking about conditions on Emacs
versions all along in this discussion?  I did not propose that as a
change, I carried it along.

  > Why do you think a more restricted test of the version number would be
  > better than a more general test?

If people would like other tests too, I have nothing against them.
The issue is how to implement whatever tests we support.  If they can
be done at compiler time, isn't this the better implementation?

I guess I don't follow.  Why do you prefer `hash-if' rather
than this simple compile-time syntax?  Why change the syntax rather
than using the syntax we use now?


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)