Re: A read-based grep-like for symbols (el-search?) (was Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master))

[Gregory Heytings]

> > Speaking of shorthands, if only the "local" part of every symbol's name 
> > was something reliable (as is often the case in module/package systems 
> > out there), we could still implement the search for references using 
> > Grep fairly efficiently: you Grep across the files for the local name, 
> > and then post-filter the references by looking at the end of the file.
>
> Yes, yes, that's basically what happens with Common Lisp, because things 
> are separated by `:`.  And in many other languages as you say. 
> Unfortunately, it's not 100% clean in Elisp because it relies on 
> convention, not syntax.

It seems very easy to enforce a syntax for this:

diff --git a/src/lread.c b/src/lread.c
index af0a799459..b66585df7d 100644
--- a/src/lread.c
+++ b/src/lread.c
@@ -4657,6 +4657,7 @@ oblookup_considering_shorthand (Lisp_Object obarray, 
const char *in,
       Lisp_Object lh_prefix = XCDR (pair);
       if (!STRINGP (sh_prefix) || !STRINGP (lh_prefix))
        continue;
+      sh_prefix = concat2 (sh_prefix, build_string ("::"));
       ptrdiff_t sh_prefix_size = SBYTES (sh_prefix);

       /* Compare the prefix of the transformation pair to the symbol

The "::" separator has a similar purpose in other languages (C++, Perl), 
it is not used anywhere in Emacs core, and it is used in a single place in 
ELPA (var::append-list in hyperbole).  The ":" separator is already used 
in quite a few places, in Emacs core and in ELPA.