Re: tags for functions

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ted Z wrote in comp.emacs and gnu.emacs.help:
>
>> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:29:45 -0800 (PST) Xah Lee <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> XL> Note that listing related functions in a function's doc is in many
>> XL> programing manuals. e.g Mathematica, MS's JScript, PHP ... they are
>> XL> quite useful. Because for those not expert yet of a lang (which is
>> XL> majority), often they do not know similar functions or do not know if
>> XL> there's manual section that list such, and often are confused about
>> XL> the differences of many functions that seems the same ....
>>
>> I agree this would be useful. It's best done with tags IMO, rather
>> than explicitly listing the related functions. For example, motion
>> commands should be tagged "motion" and then every command with that
>> tag can automatically list every motion command. The key is that the
>> extra work is in classification, not in tediously listing every
>> command's peers.
>>
>> Tags I could use: motion, file, coding-system, menu, buffer, process
>>
>> Each package should probably tag its commands with the package name.
>>
>> Short tags are not always descriptive enough, but long tags get
>> unpleasantly verbose so the real art is in balancing between the two.
>>
>> Anything more hierarchical than tags is painful to manage in the long run.
>
> A tangential discussion about the inconsistent naming of motion commands
> led me to the proposal above.
>
> I think it would be a nice addition to Emacs.  I did a search and didn't
> find prior relevant discussions.
>
> Every package with a comment stating Keywords: at the beginning could
> automatically give those keywords as tags to its functions.  That would
> probably be 50% or less of the total needed tags, but it's an easy
> start.

I think the idea is nice, but maybe keywords should be used (like in
defcustom etc) for the implementation?