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

[Gregory Heytings]

> > 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.
>
> I don't think this is a problem.  Grep comes the world of Unix and its 
> mantras.  But Lisp REPLs come from another world.
>
> Using grep and tag systems to reason about a Lisp program is like eating 
> soup with a fork.  You can do it

You could do it for Emacs 1 up to and including Emacs 28.

> but it's the wrong tool.

And what is/what are the "right" tool(s) for the above use case?

I agree with you on one point: in some cases grep/tags are not the best 
tools, because they will not display all actual matches.  This is not only 
true for Lisp, it's also true for plain C, in which tokens can be the 
result of preprocessing.  But they are (much used) tools on programmer's 
workbenches, and if something can be done to avoid breaking them, or at 
least to make it easier to adapt them to the change, that would be better.