Re: A short defense of shorthands.el (but CL packages are still better)

[Richard Stallman]

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  > You would see, in the Emacs echo area line, the indication

  >   xenomorph-foo: (POINT)

  > every time point is over a reference to the function x-foo.

Is that behavior bar?  What behavior would we prefer ElDoc to
implememt for such cases?  Would we want it to show `x-foo' instead of
`xenomorph-foo' in the echo area?,

How does ElDoc know to apply the shorthands for x.el when looking at
the text of x.el?  Does ElDoc have code to do this explicitly?

  > > Maybe you're right about C-h f, but you have not specified the
  > > scenario fully.  What does the user actually type, to invoke it?

  > Type this:

  >    C-h f x e n o TAB RET

  > This will most likely lead to a *Help* buffer displaying xenomorph-foo's
  > docstring.

That seems correct to me.  `xenomorph-foo' is a defined function; why
shouldn't C-h f know about it?

  > way you invoke the interactive function defined above is

  >    M-x xenomorph-foo RET

  > _not_

  >    M-x x-foo

That too seems correct to me.

When I consider the case of `string.el', which would rename s-* to
string-*, these all seem like correct behavior (though M-x won't allow
these functions under any name, since they are not interactive).

  > And if the function ever signals an error, and you have the debugger
  > activated, then this is what shows up in the Backtrace:

  >    Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "ohno")
  >      signal(error ("ohno"))
  >      error("ohno")
  >      xenomorph-foo(104)
  >      funcall-interactively(xenomorph-foo 104)

I think that is correct, too.  It might be confusing
if you are looking at the source of x.el and you don't
notice it uses a shorthand.  Nonetheless, it is correct.


-- 
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)