Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Artur Malabarba]

2015-10-13 15:39 GMT+01:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> Artur Malabarba <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On 13 Oct 2015 2:06 pm, "Sergey Organov" <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Dunno if enforcing one form or another makes sense.
>>
>> It makes sense to prevent inconsistencies and confusion of new
>> contributors (specially at almost zero cost).
>
> Well, people who cannot figure out that "const char" and "char const"
> are the same are not likely to find their way across our code base.  At
> any rate, "const" in C is nuisance-only and not meaning-conveying like
> in C++ where it may take part in disambiguation as well as semantics
> (copy constructor calls behave specially and are very much const &).
>
> So the "confusion" here is restricted to "oh, the compiler does not
> complain?".

No, the confusion is "which one of these does what I want?".
I can perfectly figure the answer to that question on my own by
googling (which is "either"). That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
It's yet another small obstacle/time-waste/distraction I would have to
overcome.

The point is not that people can't figure it out. The point is that
the fewer useless things to figure out, the better.