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

[Gregory Heytings]

> > Yes, it'll break a lot of tooling.
>
> Can you report any specific problems?

A simple example: suppose you want to check which ELPA package activates 
tab-bar-mode.  That's easy to do with "grep -R tab-bar-mode" in a clone of 
the ELPA repository.  With symbol prefix renaming, a package author might 
decide to add ("tb-" . "tab-bar-") in the shorthands of the package, and 
"grep -R tab-bar-mode" will not show anything.  Likewise for tag systems, 
the symbols that are recorded will possibly be different in each package, 
and a search for tab-bar-mode will not return occurrences of tb-mode.

> > My argument was: If we want to add something along these lines, it 
> > should be more like Common Lisp's package system.
>
> That is far more complex and has deep flaws.  The symbol prefix renaming 
> feature is much cleaner.

Indeed, but IMO only if it comes with an unambiguous textual indication 
that the symbol will be transformed by the Lisp reader into another 
symbol, for example "::" between the shorthand and the rest of the symbol. 
Not only will those who read the code immediately see that tb::mode is a 
shorthand and not a regular Elisp symbol, but it becomes much easier to 
instruct tools such as grep or tag systems to preprocess el files by first 
expanding tb::mode into tab-bar-mode.