Re: Structured data in Emacs Lisp

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "PT" == PT  <mailshield.gg@mailnull.com> writes:

  PT> On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:03:45 +0200, Phillip Lord
  PT> <p.lord@cs.man.ac.uk>
  PT> wrote:

  >>
  >> plists, or a hashtable would also work.

  PT> Are there any portability considerations regarding these
  PT> constructs?  Any XEmacs guys here?

plist should work fine I think. hashtables were new for Emacs 21. But
I've used them in packages which apparently work on XEmacs, so you
should be alright. 


  PT> I develop on GNU Emacs, but I want to be on the safe side if the
  PT> need of supporting XEmacs arises in the future, so I'd avoid
  PT> using GNU Emacs specific data structures if possible.


Sensible enough. My experience with trying to support both emacs is
that it's often small differences which cause problems rather than
missing features. For one package I wrote, I spent an hour trying to
debug an XEmacs problem which turned out to be because the `subseq'
function behaves differently between the two. What a nightmare!

In general, now, I write for GNU Emacs. If it's a nice package,
someone will port it to XEmacs sooner or later. 

Cheers

Phil