Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I went ahead and pushed this (along with > and =, which seems like a
>> natural set).
>
> Like Richard, I think that not all of the functions are needed,
> because some can be trivially expressed by others.

Yes, I think <, = and > are the ones that are nice to have.  The /=, <=
and >= are trivial to express via the others, so I didn't go there.

> I thought we always implemented only the minimum required set.  For
> example, we have version<, but not version>=; we have
> string-collate-lessp, but not string-collate-greaterp.

I'm generally in favour of >, but these two are almost only used for
sorting, which makes the other forms superfluous.  (I know that there
are people who insist that < should be the only operator, and they write
code like (if (< 50 tom's-age) ...), and in my experience that leads to
people not being able to read the resulting code.)

> Why do we need to stray from that principle in this case?  And if we
> must have all of those functions, why cannot they share most of their
> code?

People say (if (< (length ...))) and (if (> (length... ))) (and =) all
over the place -- it's not used as a sorting predicate, so having the
these three seemed like the minimal set.

And I don't quite follow you -- they do share most of their code?  I
think you could push a few more lines into the shared function, but I
think the resulting code would be pretty obscure.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no