Re: Include modern-cpp-font-lock into GNU Emacs

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018, at 1:28 PM, Andy Moreton wrote:

On Mon 20 Aug 2018, Jostein Kjønigsen wrote:

As I've mentioned in another reply on this subject, decoupling cc-mode

releases from Emacs-releases will make it harder for third-party major-

modes deriving from cc-mode to maintain compatibility when cc-mode

introduces breaking changes.

Currently we can inspect "cc-mode version" by checking emacs-version,

and dispatching compatible code based on that.

Checking version numbers is the wrong approach for feature detection,

and should only be a last resort if checking behaviour is not practical.

If an ELPA package results in more frequent updates to cc-mode then

third party extension authors will simply have to adapt to a slightly

faster release cadence.

    AndyM

Agreed, but (to my knowledge) Emacs lacks proper introspection capacities, and there's no way up front to know if  a function requires 3 or 5 parameters until you've called it and your code has crashed.

Compared to that, verifying version numbers against known points of change seem like a much better strategy. It is also the advice I've received from other people around in the Emacs-community.

--

Regards

Jostein Kjønigsen

address@hidden 🍵 address@hidden

https://jostein.kjonigsen.net