Re: table.el

[Richard Stallman]

    > The local/global handling is just a few lines of code.  Making a
    > subroutine for that would cost more than it is worth.  It would make
    > the code slower, and bigger, and more work to understand because not
    > self-contained.

    The advantage of a shared function comes in the case where we want to
    extend the semantics of hooks (as in my example of locally removing
    a function that's only present on the global part of the hook).

In principle, that is an advantage in some cases.  But it is small,
and there are disadvantages too.

If in fact we ever do make this more complex, we could make a
subroutine then.  Most likely that will never happen.  We cannot
afford to complicate programs whenever the complexity *might* someday
be useful, because there are so many different kinds of complexity
which *might* someday be useful.  Just the complexity we *need today*
is hard to deal with.  We must limit ourselves to the complexity we
DO need, not the complexity we MIGHT need.