Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   >    However, if somebody writes such code, it is almost trivial to fix
   >    it with search and replace:
   >
   >       "(= (length" -> "(length="
   >       "(< (length" -> "(length<"
   >       "(> (length" -> "(length>"
   >       "(/= (length" -> "(length/="
   >       "(<= (length" -> "(length<="
   >       "(>= (length" -> "(length>="
   >
   >    (plus extra closing paren)
   >
   > Users will assume that these length>= hacks will make their code
   > magically better, when they just hide a problematic form -- doing a
   > possibly complicated operation inside a predicate call.

   It will make their code better.  I do not see any magic there, it
   is pretty simple and logical.

I don't see how.  The pretense here is optimization, the user has to
be active no matter what even to discover these functions.  The two
functions are advertised as equal as well, so there is no possible way
for the user to know which one to use when, and it might be suprising
that the behaviour (in run time) is different.


If the two forms are exactly equivalent, then the bytecompiler should
be able to do the work instead of the user.


And is it just me, but I'd expect that length>, etc takes two or more
sequences and returns a boolean if one of sequence is
larger/smaller/equal/...