Re: Emacs documentation sources

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:17:40 +0200
>> 
>> > Do you really claim that the size of DOC strings is of no concern at
>> > all?
>> 
>> Since they reside in the .elc files and/or the DOC file and are only
>> ever loaded into memory temporarily when they are actually consulted,
>> they take up only disk space, not main memory.  Just like the manual.
>
> Perhaps you should re-read th relevant sources before you make such
> assertions.  What I see there is that each displayed doc string is
> kept in memory twice, and it remains in memory until the next GC.
>
> So, temporary or not, the doc strings do in fact occupy memory for
> more than a split second.

"occupy" is the wrong word for something that goes away on garbage
collection.  _Everything_ in Emacs touches memory until it gets
collected.  But DOC strings are not even loaded _until_ you look at
them explicitly.

So your claim that DOC strings have to be kept terse for memory
conversation reasons is plain and unadulterated nonsense.  And this
utterly silly smokescreen followup thread (where you, quite prudently,
snip out the original _relevant_ wrong claim of yours time and again
in order to argue some less embarrassing points) does not change that.

We might as well call it quits.

Again, here is your quote which started this:

    Doc strings not always target newbies, because they cannot be too
    wordy (due to considerations of memory footprint of the running
    Emacs).

Please don't omit this quote if you feel you want to continue to
pretend defending it.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum