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RE: Consistent naming in woman.el


From: Drew Adams
Subject: RE: Consistent naming in woman.el
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 09:30:07 -0800 (PST)

> > Not sure about this case, but such capitalization has been used in some
> > Elisp packages to indicate "internal" vs "exported"
> functions/vars/commands.
> 
> Indeed.  We have something similar in info.el, I think.

And in Customize: `Custom-*' commands.

But no, the convention (FWIW) is _not_ designed to distinguish
"internal" from "exported" things.  (The very notion of "internal"
vs "exported" is somewhat alien to tradtional Emacs, IMO.)

The convention is there to make it easier to match some command
names when completing (including for `C-h f', but mainly for `M-x').
The idea is to not present you with too many, somewhat extraneous,
commands when you use `M-x'.  The names of more esoteric commands
are capitalized, the idea being that you will more likely type
lowercase, and so will not be bothered with those names.

That is, commands that are more commonly expected to be used with
`M-x' are not capitalized when this convention is followed.
Commands that are expected to be invoked less often using `M-x'
(e.g. invoked mainly by keys or menus) are capitalized.

Thus:
`info', but `Info-virtual-index'
`customize-option', but `Custom-help'

Whether this convention is really useful nowadays, since completion
can include partial-complete, substring matching etc., is debatable.
But that was the idea, anyway, AFAIK.



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