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Re: Standardizing more key bindings?


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: Re: Standardizing more key bindings?
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2020 23:35:01 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0

On 01.11.2020 06:27, Richard Stallman wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I wrote

     > The term "REPL" is inapplicable for most of these languages, since
     > they do not have anything comparable ton read, eval, or print.

You responded,

   > It's useless to fight to reserve this term to Lisp: it has been solidly
   > coined for similar programs in non-homoiconic languages as well for the
   > last 10-20 years at least.

which seems to be a change of subject, because you're talking about
some sort of "fight".

I'm talking about the question of what terminology we should use in
describing and designing GNU Emacs.  We should use clear and correct
terminology.

We should also try to call things generally the same names what other people have already assigned to them. That allows us to benefit from a shared language (a technical dialect of English) and help users that just start out with Emacs to do it faster and easier.

Doing that does not require that we fight with other groups
that make other decisions.

If we assign a different name for a thing than most other people use, our name will be "fighting" the existing name in the minds of our users.

That would be more apparent, however, if Emacs were more popular.

   > The languages in question might not have the same kind of 'read', but
   > they usually have 'eval', and their REPLs do 'print'.

'read' and 'eval' are things that those lanuages don't have.
You might want to familiarize yourself more with e.g. JavaScript.

eval('1 + 1')
=> 2



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