Re: [PATCH] (icomplete-vertical-mode): Add support for affixations and, annotations

[João Távora]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> I see, broken windows.  You keep asking for good API's but when things
>> are proposed in that direction "that's good" but doesn't matter.
>
> [ Remember that the whole design of Emacs and ELisp goes against the
>   usual software engineering practice of using encapsulation and
>   abstraction to modularize the code so that one part can't mess with
>   the other.

No it doesn't :-) At least I don't design Lisp (Elisp or CL) systems
that way (or Ruby or JS, for more examples).  Encapsulation or
abstraction aren't property of a specific language.  Elisp can't
strictly enforce many things the way a C++ compiler refuses to compile,
but that doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of compile-time and run-time
assertions, much less that they are are useless.  Among many examples,
just because Emacs Lisp uses a shared symbol namespace (sigh...) hasn't
stopped us from making the '--' convention or, say, carefully deciding
if a variable name should end in "-functions" or "-function".  This is
nor bikeshedding for me, it's a daily part of design.

>   Instead, Emacs's idea of empowering users means that for one part to
>   be able to mess with another is considered a feature rather than
>   a bug, and the "abstraction boundaries" are enforced by conventions
>   rather than by technical means.

By both.  There's always a way to subvert API intent by the programmer.
That's fine, but it doesn't mean it should be easy to.  Pretty sure one
can frobnicate the order of the candidates in a single-arg annotation
function, but it's going to be a lot more code.

João