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

[Richard Stallman]

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  > * C-h o and similar commands _could_ theoretically be changed to
  >   complement that list of symbols with the list of shorthands to symbols
  >   of the buffer.

  >   That would be a non-trivial effort and would bring grave confusion.

I don't see that it would cause grave confusion.

  >   That's because, as you have well written elsewhere, the Lisp reader
  >   follows 's-foo' to 'string-library-foo' on this buffer but may follow
  >   it to 'system-library-foo' in another buffer.

That is true.

If the extension I proposed for C-h o is made, then C-h o s-foo RET
would present info on 'string-library-foo' in one buffer, and about
'system-library-foo' in another buffer.  But if the help buffer
explains this clearly, it will make sense to the user, and it will be
useful.


-- 
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)