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

[T.V Raman]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

I'd like to highlight this line from RMS:
<cite>

If the screen does not match the buffer, that is chaos.
</cite>
and enshrine it as a key tenet in everything we design going forward.

Note that there are corner cases where the above can already be violated
via display text properties and overlays.

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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.

-- 

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
?7?4 Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  ?0?8