Re: [PATCH] Clojure-like syntactic sugar for an anonymous function literal

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Oleh writes:
 > >  > How is `dash' better?
 > >
 > > It's not in XEmacs core, so I don't have to look at it.
 > 
 > Still, I would not mark it as "Problem solved".  For many people,
 > Emacs is unusable without third party packages, where solutions to
 > like `dash' surface to problems that could be better solved in the
 > core.

I disagree that it's a problem, and I disagree that it's a better
solution even if my users were to say it's a problem.

 > > The proposed "short-lambda" is pure sugar and adds zero expressiveness
 > > to the language.  Furthermore, in Emacsen it would be subject to
 > > substantial abuse (eg, in hooks where anonymous functions are a bad
 > > idea).
 > 
 > Of course it's pure sugar. It's short-lambda's sole intention.
 > 
 > But isn't the backquote also pure sugar?

Yes, in some sense, but in another, it is not: backquote adds a
template language to Lisp, which in combination with macros is very
expressive.  Short-lambda just makes it easier to write obscure code
concisely.