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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | Re: Opaque objects and Emacs documentation |
Date: | Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:31:04 +0300 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0 |
On 21.07.2020 22:33, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Similarly, the "transient" project instance returned by project-current itself, when a project doesn't yet exist, is also known, and its structure could be similarly documented without impediment to extensibility.If you say that, could you give an example of something that *would* be an impediment to extensibility?What you said: describing what generics returns, or what project-current returns in general.
No, describing "in general" is good. What is bad is describing "in particular" when a function is "general" and can return values that are different from the examples. project-current is "general".
And speaking of "transient", it's not helpful to say it returns a cons (transient . root) because that doesn't say anything about the project behavior anyway (which is the important part).
Whether the structure is obvious from the implementation may or may not be true (and the author of the code is usually not the best judge of that), but doesn't solve the issue at hand, IMO.So have we moved on from trying to document the examples in the docstrings of project-find-functions or project-current?If those are the rules of the game, yes. IOW, if it's not okay to describe the possible forms of the object in the doc string of project-find-functions, but okay to describe them in the individual doc strings of each hook that can be put there, then it could be an acceptable compromise, at least from my POV.
Very well. The "transient" project is not on the hook, though.
A good documentation of an interface should allow a developer to write code that uses the interface without looking at the interface's implementation.Right. But there won't be any third-party callers of project-try-vc, this function's only purpose is to be inside project-find-functions.I'm thinking about additional "authors" who'd like to add functionality to existing project backends.
They won't call it either. If they do, the function is likely to have changed significantly from its current state.
If it is necessary to consult the implementation, that is an indication of some deficiency in the docs, and we should try to avoid that as much as possible.No disagreement there, as long as we're talking about public functions.Are we still under the rule that any function without 2 dashes in its name is public? If so, then I think we have only discussed public functions in this and related threads.
OK, I have a question then. Does every built-in member of a public hook need to be public?
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