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

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Another simpler, less "revolutionary" option (can't find the right word) is
  > to do what Eli suggested, having 'C-h f s-foo TAB' expand to the actual
  > symbol name, according to the buffer, using the normal completion
  > mechanisms of Emacs.

That does sound good.

For any system that established file-specific aliases for symbols,
even if it were like Common Lisp packages, it would happen that the
aliases that are meaningful in one buffer may not be meaningful in
another.  With Common Lisp packages, a certain package could be
imported into file A and not into file B, so some or all of its
symbols would get shorter names in A and not B.

So the help commands would face the challenge of how to deal with
that.

It seems to me that we can separate, at least in principle, the
question of how help commands to handling that situation from the way
that the aliasing is implemented.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)