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Re: Decoded time accessors
From: |
Clément Pit-Claudel |
Subject: |
Re: Decoded time accessors |
Date: |
Sun, 7 Jul 2019 18:25:29 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.7.2 |
On 2019-07-07 17:43, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> We've coped now with (nth 8 state) (for the starting position of a
> string or comment) for decades now without any problems. The sort of
> "readability hack" proposed, as it is steadily proliferated, makes the
> entry barrier for new Elisp programmers steadily higher. To use it is
> one extra thing which has to be learned, or looked up.
FWIW, I disagree; I find that these accessor functions actually help. And I
think I count as fairly new, since I've been writing ELisp for just 5 years.
The nice part about these accessor functions is that I only have to look them
up once (and often not even once, since the name gives a precise enough idea of
what they do). But after 5 years, I still can't remember what each part of
syntax-ppss means (and I end up defining my own aliases in each new package).
Besides, if I want detailed documentation, having to click on one more link to
get to the docstring of file-attributes really isn't much of a problem, as far
as I'm concerned. And if a piece of code does (nth 3 attrs), how am I supposed
to know that I have to look at the documentation of file-attributes to know
what is in attrs? If attrs is an argument of the current function I need to
read the docstring, and if there isn't one or it doesn't say then I have to
find the callers. That's a lot harder than if the code used an accessor
function on attrs.
Clément.