Re: The poor state of documentation of pcase like things.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2015 21:16:56 +0000
> Cc: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>, Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> 
> Could I suggest [pcase] be promoted in the manual a
> little. Currently, it's a subnode of "conditionals", but pattern
> match is really a form of control flow in its own right.

If that's your itch, feel free to scratch it.

IMO, that's largely a waste of your time and energy: the manual is
rarely if ever read in its entirety, or even in large portions.  Most
of its uses is to quickly find the subject whose description you need,
hopefully by using the Info-index command ("i TOPIC RET"), and read
that and perhaps some of the cross-references there.  With this use
case, the level on which a description is found is irrelevant.

Btw, the importance is in the eyes of the beholder.  You look at that
through the glasses of someone who hacks Emacs core.  Try to take the
POV of a casual Lisper who just wants to put some advanced
customizations in her ~/.emacs, for example.  IOW, advanced features
and subjects are frequently very important to power users, but much
less so to "mere mortals".  The manual is supposed to serve both types
of audience.

Bottom line: what we do need is make the description clear and
complete.  Where it appears is orders of magnitude less important.