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

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Thu 30 Sep 2021 at 15:57, João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 3:27 PM Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> wrote:
>
>> That does not work.  Common Lisp reader is programable.  If you do not
>> compile and load everything needed sucessfully, the reader will fail for
>> anything non-trivial.
>
> Those non-trivial things are quite rare,

Not really.

> and good reader etiquette makes the code that is CL:READ with a
> non-full reader at least make a good deal of sense.

What is "good reader etiquette"?

What if some library does not have "good reader etiquette"?
Do you give up search because of that?

>> > You're supposed to have it loaded in your image while you develop it.
>>
>> You can restrict yourself like that but why do you think that it is a
>> reasonable restriction for everybody?
>
> I don't know if it's a restriction.  It's what I and many consider the most
> useful way to work with Lisp.  To have symbolic information at our
> fingertips.  You like to have line-based literal-text information, sure go
> ahead!  But you'll be missing a lot of free structure.
> It's free symbolic real-estate!

It is not a choice between one or the other.
I need both.
Please do not break grep and web search.

>> > And grep fails very horribly in Common Lisp as you well know, if
>> > you include the package qualifier.
>> That's why good programmers make effort to choose good names independent
>> of language.
>
> So when you program CL you repeat the package qualifier in the symbol name?
> I've seen that, yuck. And you never use `:USE` (not even` :USE :CL`) and you
> always refer to the same symbol by the very same name every time? And
> all your colleagues and the code you use in Common Lisp does that?

Use common sense and do not work against the available tools.
There are some heuristics for choosing good names.