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Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?


From: Richard Stallman
Subject: Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2023 21:57:02 -0500

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  > But when you need to process plists, for example, it becomes
  > very handy.  This construct, which does require knowing a bit
  > of the mini-language that is cl-loop,

  >   (cl-loop for (k v) on plist by #'cddr collect (cons k v))

It is certainly concise.  If I saw that code I would not understand it,
but if you said what job it does I could see how it might do that.

That's because cl-loop defines its own little language, which I don't know.

The question of readability here is a combination of two questions
that work against each other.  First, how readable are the programs ou
can write in that little language?  Second, how readable are they to
those who don't know the little language?

This is a rather extreme example of how the frequent use of the CL
constructs, so that they become part of typical Emacs Lisp code, adds
to what people need to know in order to understand typical Emacs Lisp
code.
-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)





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