Re: Emacs documentation sources

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>> Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 01:13:21 +0200
>> 
>> But DOC strings are not even loaded _until_ you look at
>> them explicitly.
>
> You seem to forget about the `apropos-*' commands (which were the
> reason for this thread in the first place).

The only apropos command that gets possibly involved here is C-u C-h
d, namely apropos-documentation with DO-ALL set.  And then the _size_
of the docs strings is mostly irrelevant, the performance is impacted
by the _number_ of them.

>> So your claim that DOC strings have to be kept terse for memory
>> conversation reasons is plain and unadulterated nonsense.  And this
>> utterly silly smokescreen followup thread (where you, quite
>> prudently, snip out the original _relevant_ wrong claim of yours
>> time and again in order to argue some less embarrassing points)
>> does not change that.
>
> I admire your argument culture and style, David.

Sorry for calling your game.

>> Again, here is your quote which started this:
>> 
>>     Doc strings not always target newbies, because they cannot be too
>>     wordy (due to considerations of memory footprint of the running
>>     Emacs).
>> 
>> Please don't omit this quote if you feel you want to continue to
>> pretend defending it.
>
> Done.

Fine.  Now is there anybody except Eli that would thing it likely that
DOC strings are necessary because of the memory footprint of the
running Emacs?

While the memory footprint of the running Emacs is presumably not
affected by a non-terse manual?

At the current point of time, this argument is just specious.  In the
long long history of Emacs, there has been a time indeed when DOC
strings were stored in memory (rather than passed through temporarily
on demand).  To stop this from being a possible concern, they have
been externalized to disk files.  Likely somewhere in the Emacs 18.*
series.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum