Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 02 Oct 2021 01:24:22 +1300
> From: Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>
> Cc: acm@muc.de, joaotavora@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 2021-10-01 19:09, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > And I'm saying that this will be a bad solution, since many features
> > that identify symbols by name will not work with those "display-only"
> > names that the user sees.  So using something like that is a net loss
> > for users: it "fixes" a minor readability issue, but introduces major
> > usability issues.
> 
> Major usability issues caused by things not being what they appear
> to be?  Not to put too finer point on it, but that is precisely what
> this thread has been about from the beginning.

No, because shorthands are known to Lisp.  They aren't a display-time
feature.

> > The existence of shorthands in Emacs core is not a sign to anyone
> > that the feature can be abused.  We in the Emacs project development
> > cannot be held responsible for irresponsible acts of others, it is
> > highly unfair for you and others to hold us to such a standard!
> 
> I absolutely agree that you are not responsible for irresponsible acts
> of others, but I don't think it was at all unreasonable to raise these
> concerns.

Sure, just don't raise them with us.

> I do believe that I've failed to convince you on the subject of
> shorthands, however, so I shall hope that documentation dissuading
> people from misusing the feature will prove sufficient for avoiding
> very many such cases.

We should mention the possible caveats of this, yes.