Re: Replace trivial pcase occurrences in the Emacs sources

[João Távora]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> 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. ]]]
>
>   > In what sense is the above cl-case more clear than the pcase equivalent?
>   > I'm not saying the pcase version is better in those cases, but I think
>   > the respective advantages and disadvantages pretty much balance out.
>
> I also wonder.  Is it simply that people find pcase unfamiliar?

My two cents: I like to write it, I don't like to read it.

I like to write it because it's fun.  I write some dummy '(1 2 (3 4 5) 6
7) into my code and then semi-randomly hammer out parenthesis,
backquotes, commas and underscores until it does what I want.  In the
end I'm happy for winning this little game, and happily convinced it
saved me a ton of LOC (which it probably did).  When reading it, I
shudder a little.  The backquote syntax helps in warning that something
potentially difficult is in front of me, so please don't remove it.

I can't explain, but I don't feel this way about destructuring-bind (or
its destructuring-case variants [0]): they're boring to write and easy
to read.

João

[0]:
http://www.crategus.com/books/alexandria/pages/alexandria.0.dev_fun_destructuring-case.html