Re: Help sought understanding shorthands wrt modules/packages

[Gerd Möllmann]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > Example from the Info manual
>
>   >      ;; read-symbol-shorthands: (("snu-" . "some-nice-string-utils-"))
>
>   > The "snu-" definition is not recorded anywhere, nothing is preventing
>   > someone else from also using "snu-", or warning about it.
>
> There is no need to prevent someone else from using it.  Each file's
> shorthands are local: they do not conflict with other files.  If you
> want to define `snu-' as a shorthand in your file, go ahead.

There is no control over this, at least in the present implementation.
Nothing makes sure or warns if you bind read-symbol-shorthands in
whichever way you want.

>
>                                                                You can't
>   > find out that "snu-" was used to read it from looking at a symbol,
>
> Why does that matter?
> If what appears in the code is `some-nice-string-utils-concat', when is
> it crucial to find out whether a shorthand was used to enter it?

It's the other way round: there is snu-concat in some buffer, and you
want to get to some-nice-string-utils-concat.  How do you get there?  Or
is the plan that one can find that out in source file, and not in
*scratch*?  And so on.

> Is this about the grep shortcoming?  I don't think CL packages avoid
> that.

No, that was a bad example of me.