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Oddities with dynamic modules


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Oddities with dynamic modules
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2018 21:12:54 +0300

Having written the documentation of the module API, I couldn't help
but notice a few oddities about its repertory.  I list below the
issues that caused me to raise a brow, for the record:

 . Why do we have functions to access vectors, but not functions to
   access lists?  I always thought lists were more important for Emacs
   than vectors.  If we are asking users to use 'intern' to access
   'car' and 'cdr', why not 'aref' and 'aset'?

 . Why aren't there API functions to _create_ lists and vectors?

 . Using 'funcall' is unnecessarily cumbersome, because the function
   to be called is passed as an 'emacs_value'.  Why don't we have a
   variant that just accepts a name of a Lisp-callable function as a C
   string?

 . Why does 'intern' only handle pure ASCII symbol names?  It's not
   like supporting non-ASCII names is hard.

 . I could understand why equality predicates are not provided in the
   API, but I don't understand why we do provide 'eq' there.  Is it
   that much more important than the other predicates?

IOW, if the API was supposed to be minimal, it looks like it isn't;
and if it wasn't supposed to be minimal, then some important/popular
functions are strangely missing, for reasons I couldn't wrap my head
around.

Thanks.



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