Re: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> And you're really not interested in a discussion of your motives or the
> circumstance under which you'd make an exception, are you?

I think we've already discussed it at length in the cl-lib era.
It's largely an aesthetic issue: you want to save those 4 "gen-"
characters, whereas I want to keep the namespace clean.  As mentioned
I also want to keep things discoverable and modular, and given the lack
of real modules, using a "gen-" prefix is the way to make things
discoverable and modular.  Note that when I code in languages with good
module systems, I still use "prefixes", tho instead of "gen-" it would
probably be shortened to "G." or something like that.

As can be seen with the seq.el library, I want to move towards *more*
use of prefixes even for "core" functionality.  This has been the case
for many many years.  Even back in Emacs-21 times, my newcomment.el did
that, taking non-namespace-clean code from simple.el (or maybe it was
subr.el, can't remember) and making it use "comment-".

Over the years, my belief in the importance of using such prefixes has
only strengthened.  I know many people disagree, but at this point
there's really not much room for negotiation.
We should simply agree to disagree.


        Stefan


PS: In the case of "next", we could solve the namespace issue without
modules if Elisp had an equivalent to "foo.next".  But the only OO-style
system we have uses methods which have global scope, so we'd need
another object system with a different method-call syntax like maybe
(foo :next).