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

[Phillip Lord]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> 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.

I was suggesting it for John as he was going to write a tutorial.

> 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.

It's true. But you have to know to search for something in the first
place. Also, I might well have searched for "destructuring" -- which now
hits the seq.el documentation (implemented with pcase, but not linking
to it).


Phil