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]

> Then WTFG, watch the fine gif? Can you find out in the top message? Hope 
> you can. The answer is there in front of your eyes. Watch it well. This 
> constant email flood a true DOS so I'm sorry I can't be your personal 
> tutor on the matter here.

I'm certainly not asking for a tutor, no, and no, the answer is not "in 
front of my eyes".  Because your "fine gif" doesn't show what 
"magnars-string" is.  I'm going to assume that it's the "s.el" library, at 
the end of which you added the following local variable:

;; elisp-shorthands: (("s-" . "magnars-string-"))

and in which you replaced (provide 's) by (provide 'magnars-string).

Now, I agree with you what you said in an earlier post: "Language design 
never has been held back by the particular assumptions of a search tool, 
popular and ubiquitous as it may be."  To which I would add that language 
design should not be influenced by particular choices of libraries, 
popular and ubiquitous as they may be.

A handful Elisp libraries have decided (for good reasons, but against the 
common practice so far) to use a short prefix for their functions.  That 
doesn't seem a sufficient reason to design namespaces in Elisp in such a 
way that these particular libraries need to be changed as little as 
possible.  (And they have to be changed more than you apparently think: if 
I do the above and do C-h f magnars-string-presence RET, the docstring 
says "Return S if it's `s-present?', otherwise return nil.".  Of course 
`s-present?' is not considered as a symbol in the *Help* buffer, and C-h o 
s-present? RET does not work.)

If supporting these few libraries is a requirement, a better approach 
would be to introduce a particular and temporary exception for them, 
something like:

diff --git a/src/lread.c b/src/lread.c
index af0a799459..44e94b9604 100644
--- a/src/lread.c
+++ b/src/lread.c
@@ -4657,6 +4657,10 @@ oblookup_considering_shorthand (Lisp_Object 
obarray, const char *in,
       Lisp_Object lh_prefix = XCDR (pair);
       if (!STRINGP (sh_prefix) || !STRINGP (lh_prefix))
        continue;
+      if (strlen (SSDATA (sh_prefix)) < 3)
+       sh_prefix = concat2 (sh_prefix, build_string ("-"));
+      else
+       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

Such short prefixes would raise a warning in Emacs 30, and an error in 
Emacs 32.