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

[Richard Stallman]

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  > The first use-case is to do with the "s" library, and finding
  > a way to rename all of that code with a longer prefix without
  > requiring other libraries currently requiring "s" to change...

Not solely with the `s' library; there are a few others.
But basically I think you are right about this.
And this is indeed the main intended use in Emacs itself.

  > The second use-case, and the one I think will prove to be FAR
  > more common if this goes ahead, is this: Some people simply want
  > to read and write shorter symbol names in their code.

I would not object to making rules about naming or usage conventions
for the shorter names, in the second use-case.

We can't follow those conventions for the first use-case.  They would
not work.  But it is ok to treat the two use-cases differently.

  > Instead, we would need two things:

  > 1. A way of displaying long symbols in the desired short form,
  >     such that the buffer contains the actual symbol, but the
  >     user sees the short symbol (i.e. some kind of replacing
  >     display).

  > 2. Something analogous to abbrev which recognises when someone
  >     starts typing a symbol with one of the configured short
  >     prefixes, and expands it to be the full name (but per (1)
  >     visually displayed as the short form that they typed).

I think #2 might be a good idea, but #1 would lead to horrible
confusion.  If the screen does not match the buffer, that is chaos.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)