Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

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

      (> (length x) 2)

You are assuming that X is always a list, there are far more types
than that in Emacs Lisp.  Replacing every instance of (PREDIATE
(length ...)) with (lengthPREDICATE ...) doesn't really do anything at
all for the cases where we are not working with a list -- which you
cannot possibly know just from a grep of the code.

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

But nothing is fixed by such a change, thats the whole point, if you
are working with strings you are not fixing anything!  You are
introducing a gratious change that does absolutely nothing.

   > 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?

Should have written forms, length> and (> (length ...), and the other
variants.

   > 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?

(> 6 5 4 3 2 1) --> t
(length> '(1 2 3 4) '(1 2 3) '(1 2) '(1)) --> t