Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Sun 27 Dec 2020 at 18:34, "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> wrote:
>    > 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.

By not counting all the elements of the list.

By counting only the minimum necessary.

It is fascinating how many people with strong opinions do not understand
the problem with

   (> (length x) 2)

> The pretense here is optimization, the user has to be active no matter
> what even to discover these functions.

And?

And if they fail at that, someone can once in a while fix that easily by
search, replace and visual review without introducing bugs.

> 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.

Which two functions are advertised as equal?

Where is confusion and surprise?

> 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/...

Would not that be better called sequence>?

What does "sequence is larger/smaller/equal" mean exactly?