Re: The poor state of documentation of pcase like things.

[Michael Heerdegen]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> > > including a long dispute about whether it would be better to quote _.
> > 
> > Yes, and...???
>
> And that was IMO a clear indication that even the tiniest syntax
> issues related to 'pcase' raise problems.

If the fact that some people suggested to make it possible to leave out
a comma counts as a relevant problem or bug, I must say I'm surprised
how well this quite new thing works, after all, a complete new library.

The syntax still has been changed by Stefan himself recently, so it's
normal that we still discuss it, even when we didn't find a conclusion.


> If the semantics are not clear, the syntax is the first suspect.

> > > Using such a beast where it is not required makes reading harder
> > > because it requires the reader to understand its syntax, if nothing
> > > else.
> > 
> > And that's the real problem: (some) people refrain to try to understand
> > the syntax and prefer to complain.
>
> That's not my concern.  I'm not one of those people.

Ok.  So, what aspect of the semantics did you find not clear after
reading the documentation we currently have?


> > Sorry, I give up.  pcase seems to scare off people somehow.  If 50
> > percent of the people are not able to cope with the thing, for whatever
> > reason, and get stalled whenever they see it, I think we probably can't
> > use it.  A pity.
>
> I never said anything even close to such an extreme.  I don't think
> there's any danger of refraining to use 'pcase' any time soon.  It
> does its job well, and where it's needed, it should definitely be
> used.

That sounds somewhat different from what you said previously ("beast",
your conclusions about the discussion that the thing is "weird", etc).


Regards,

Michael.