Subject: bug#59082: 28.2; Undocumented `intern-soft` feature with shorthands symbols

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2022 22:13:00 -0500

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  > I understand. I'm saying docstrings are outside the functional scope of
  > shorthands, so you should just use longhand there for now. Same as you must
  > use in M-x and other "global" contexts. Because shorthands are not new
  > names for symbols.

Is this really a problem?

Let's consider the case of s.el.  `s.el' says s-foo, and we use a
shorthand to make that read as `string-foo'.  As far as I can see,
anything which uses the symbol's name will use `string-foo'.  That is
the desired behavior.

But if a doc string in s.el actually says "Calls the function
`s-foo'", nothing will translate that to `string-foo', So we will get
incorrect and confusing output.

Does any doc string in s.el actually use the name of a function or
variable in s.el?  I got an explanation of how to obtain the
source code but I have not had time to do it yet.

Maybe we need a construct to use in doc strings
that requests shorthands processing on a part of the doc string.
This would have to happen at read time, when the doc string is read,
so that the proper shorthands are in effect there.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)