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#56393
Actually fix the long lines display bug
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> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann <at> gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2022 08:25:29 +0200
> Cc: gregory <at> heytings.org,
> larsi <at> gnus.org,
> 56393 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
>
> I used the term habitability in the sense of Richard Gabriel in Patterns of Software.
>
> https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
>
> "Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people
> coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably
> and confidently."
>
> (There's of course more...)
>
> From my POV, the names are quite self-explanatory, and in a production
> build these small functions are all inlined by the compiler, so I
> don't think I see a significant downside.
>
> But now, as in this case with the new variable, one has to write a new bset function, for no other reason than
> to make matters worse by introducing inconsistency by having some variables that habe a bset and other
> that have not... I'm sure you understand what I mean.
Well, that's true, but we have a lot of similarly "un-habitable" stuff
in Emacs anyway. Most of that is due to the aspects of the Emacs
architecture, which is somewhat unique for a C program: automatic GC,
proliferation non-local exits, differences between external and
internal representation of text, C structs that represent Lisp
objects, etc. As a simple example, the rule to use ENCODE_FILE and
DECODE_FILE when calling any file-name-oriented C APIs is one such
convention that newcomers have difficulties with following.
This bug report was last modified 3 years and 33 days ago.
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