Re: what is the point of point-min?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:11:30 -0700
> From: Greg Hill <ghill@synergymicro.com>
>
> Though not by any means a "C guru," I 
> have done a fair amount of both writing C code from scratch and 
> maintaining other people's C code; and I have long-since concluded 
> that looking at the C source for Emacs hoping to figure out what it 
> is doing is a total waste of my time.  I have never made any 
> significant progress in anything close to a reasonable amount of time.

What other programs of comparable size did you have to read and
understand?  Perhaps Emacs (more than 300K lines of C) is much larger
than you are used to?

FWIW, the macros are there to make reading code _easier_, not harder.
Macros such as CONSP, STRINGP, XCONS, etc., should be almost instantly
understandable to anyone who knows a bit of Lisp.  By contrast, if
you'd see something like

          if ((enum Lisp_type) foo.u.type == Lisp_Cons)

you might have hard time understanding what is going on.

(It is true that, if you need to _debug_ some Emacs code, you need to
actually read and understand the macros involved.  But the need to
debug the C code is not the issue in this thread, is it?)