Re: [PATCH] Desktop mode saves mark-ring too verbosely

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Kelly Dean writes:

 > > It doesn’t look like a common abbreviation,
 > 
 > It's a common abbreviation for parallel↔serial conversion circuits,
 > which are reasonably analogous to functions that convert program
 > data to/from a text stream. And circuitry is a domain for which
 > it's common to share terminology with software.

Please don't add new abbreviations.  The docstring and/or comments can
indicate that "serializer" stands for both directions if you really
need a shorter variable name.  Or use "serialization", which is
somewhat more ambiguous about including "deserialization".

 > This table is something that only programmers, not users,

The point of free software is that there's no such distinction worth
making.  Whether one agrees philosphically or not, it makes sense to
take advantage of the "many eyes".

 > will need to understand or modify, so using a technical
 > abbreviation isn't a problem. Emacs already has abbreviated names
 > such as ⌜fboundp⌝ and ⌜fmakunbound⌝ for programmer-only things,
 > instead of ⌜function-bound-predicate⌝ and ⌜function-make-unbound⌝.

And the recent trend is to deprecate such ancient usage, including the
venerable `car', `cdr', and `cons'.

 > Spelling out
 > ⌜desktop-variable-serialization-deserialization-functions⌝ would be
 > ironic, considering the purpose of my patch.

I thought your patch was a refactoring.  That doesn't necessarily mean
code (or code components) are shorter, although it's often a happy
accidental outcome.