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From: | Gregory Heytings |
Subject: | bug#64391: buffer narrowing slowdown regression in emacs 29 |
Date: | Sun, 09 Jul 2023 16:03:52 +0000 |
Well, there's at least something that could be fixed in the manuals. I admit I had never read the "Special Forms" section, and if the manual had been consistent about the special form vs. macro distiction, perhaps I wouldn't have confused these two similar, but subtly different, notions.At the same time, for the ELisp programmer, this distinction is just an implementation detail (except for rare corner cases where the programmer needs to look at the output of `macroexpand`). What is a macro and what is a special form has changed in the past and will likely change again in the future (e.g. `defun`, `defmacro`, and `prog2` are now macros but used to be special forms).
Indeed, but... what would you suggest? Leave the manual, in which that distinction is not always clear, as it is? Fix the manual to make that distinction clearer? Remove that distinction, which is indeed an implementation detail, from the manual (and perhaps mention that some macros are not defined in Elisp but in C, in which case they can also be called "special forms")?
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