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

[Michael Heerdegen]

Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

> >> Good idea - but are you allowed to use cl-lib from it?
> >
> > That would not make much sense.
>
> Why not? Because then cl-lib would have to be loaded and we
> are not allowed to do that?

cl-lib has not really good support for set operations.  I has some
limited support for performing set operations on lists when interpreting
these as set specifications.  There is little sense in requiring this
large suite just for these three functions.

> But even so, tell me then, how will additional functions
> dealing with sets, supposedly added to set.el, how would they
> not contribute to the increased complexity of Emacs Lisp the
> same way cl-lib has?

cl-lib only implements a small subset on what is needed.  Sets are
useful mostly to provide a test "is some thing in the set?".  A natural
way to implement this feature efficiently is using hash tables.  cl-lib
has literally nothing to offer here.  There are only the functions for
lists.

And "set" can be a useful abstraction to improve readability, so having
a dedicated library providing efficient implementations would be a good
thing.


Michael.