Re: Macro used for dynamic setting of font-lock-keywords

[Kevin Rodgers]

Sebastian Tennant wrote:
> Quoth Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org>:
> > Hi,
> >
> >    seem to get used as often as it probably should. I've seen people post 20+
> >    lines of elisp to this list to do something which could be achieved more
> >    reliably with 4 or five lines of defadvice. 
> >
> > Advice is considered as *dangerous* and not to be used extensively.
> Indeed this is what I've been lead to believe.  I think RMS' position
> on defadvice, which confirms this, is knocking about somewhere.

I think RMS' position is that defadvice should not be used within Emacs
itself.  But the inclusion of defadvice.el in Emacs is tacit
acknowledgement of its usefulness: When there is no variable or hook
function that the user can customize to achieve some new behavior,
defadvice allows you to modify the behavior of a function _without
duplicating its original definition in its entirety_.  Thus you can
write a very small piece of code that is *more* likely to continue
to work over time, even as the implementation of the underlying function
evolves within Emacs, and in conjunction with other customizations of
the function.  That makes it *less* dangerous than the naive approach of
copy-and-paste.

--
Kevin Rodgers
Denver, Colorado, USA