Subject: Indentation of Emacs Lisp list constants is surprising

From: Clément Pit--Claudel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2015 13:29:54 -0500

Hi all,

I'm posting this following a suggestion from Stefan on a discussion on
Emacs' stackexchange site at https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/16942/

Emacs' indentation of Emacs Lisp code is really great, except for one thing:

(defconst one-to-ten '(one two three
                           four five six seven
                           eight nine ten))

Is this actually the preferred way to indent this block? As opposed to

(defconst one-to-ten '(one two three
                       four five six seven
                       eight nine ten))

I find it especially confusing when compared to the default for alists:

(defconst one-to-ten '((one . 1) (two . 2) (three . 3)
                       (four . 4) (five . 5) (six . 6) (seven . 7)
                       (eight . 8) (nine . 9) (ten . 10)))

Is there a reason for this behaviour? I could possibly understand it for 
back-quoted lists, as it would yield better indentation for macros, but 
what about lists? On stackexchange, Oleh suggested using  

(setq lisp-indent-function 'common-lisp-indent-function)

Cheers,
Clément.

In GNU Emacs 25.1.50.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.10.8)
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