Re: CC mode loads CL

[Martin Stjernholm]

Dave Love <address@hidden> wrote:

> Then I think it's misguided.  Files should be (batch) compiled
> separately, as with other packages.

It's a symptom of lack of control facilities in the byte compiler, at
least up to and including Emacs 21.3 (I haven't yet investigated the
byte compiler changes in cvs). The reason for most of the cc-bytecomp
stuff is to silence various warnings about unbound variables and
functions, which would otherwise be unavoidable due to the support for
several different (X)Emacs versions. (There are apparently changes in
the cvs version of the byte compiler that make this not work as
intended since there are numerous warnings there.)

Another issue it solves (along with the load-path blobs in the
beginning of each cc-*.el file) is, as Alan said, to avoid mixing in
files from older versions of CC Mode that might reside in the
load-path. It'd be nice with a variant of `require' that only looks in
the same directory as the current file.

I'd be happy to use better tools to cope with these things if/when
they are available. Unfortunately backward compatibility doesn't allow
me to remove cc-bytecomp right away when that happens.

Of course, when CC Mode is distibuted with (X)Emacs, all of these
become non-issues, but I don't want to maintain different sources.

> I don't see why CC should be different; I speak from experience with
> Gnus and W3, amongst others.

I looked at Gnus a bit before I came up with cc-bytecomp. As far as I
remember it didn't address the issues above at all.