Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[Gregory Heytings]

> > Perhaps we could alleviate this by requiring that shorthands end with a 
> > particular character (like '/' or ':'), so that if you see it in a 
> > name, it's probably a shorthand.
>
> I think that's a dreadful idea.

How so?  The purpose is only to provide an unambiguous textual clue that 
the symbol will be transformed by the Lisp reader into another symbol. 
With your examples (in the manual), the author or user of 
some-nice-string-utils.el would use

;; elisp-shorthands: (("snu" . "some-nice-string-utils-"))

(without the final dash) in its local variables, and the chosen symbol 
(after thinking a bit more about this, I think "::" which was suggested 
earlier is better than "@") between snu and the function/variable names 
throughout the file.

That would also make the task of standard tools like tags or grep easier.

> If however, you substritute "requiring shorthands to end" with "visually 
> annotating" shorthands, such as with font-lock, for example

So in the end we would have something that very much resembles nameless.el 
(a prefix defined in local variables, and using font lock to "visually 
annotate" that prefix) without its benefits (not breaking any of the 
standard tools and allowing anyone to choose whether and how they want to 
use that feature)?