Re: Imports / inclusion of s.el into Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > Basically I focus more on the advantages of putting the
  > discoverability/consistency inside the language itself instead of its
  > tools,

Changing the language for the sake of discoverability or consistency
is an incompatibility that will make life difficult for other
programmers.  If a name is not bad, we should not change it.

By contrast, we can add all sorts of tools, or alternate modes for
existing tools, without making anything difficult for anyone.  Those
who don't like the new tools and modes can simply not use them.

We can get the same results with either method.  For instance,
grouping 'concat' and 'format' with 'string-' functions can be
achieved either way.  Therefore, we must choose to the method of
tools, which doesn't inconvenience others.


As a separate matter, there may be SOME names that are so unnatural
and ugly that renaming them would be a clear improvement.  Not
'concat' or 'format' -- those names are clean and good -- but perhaps
for some of the regexp functions.

Please treat the string functions and the regexp functions as two
different issues.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)