Subject: bug#75170: add-to-alist: new function

From: Roland Winkler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:39:38 -0600

On Wed, Jan 22 2025, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I don't have strong feelings or opinions, actually.  Adding another
> API whose name is similar to an existing one, but which works
> differently (and what's worse, has different syntactic requirements),
> will add to confusion and to the documentation efforts (need to go
> through all the places where we currently recommend add-to-list and
> change them).  But if enough people insist on that...
>
> I do still wonder why people who most certainly know about Emacs Lisp
> enough to use setf/alist-git insist on adding this function to Emacs,
> even though they've already solved their problem by having a private
> definition for it.  Why insist on adding this to Emacs?  But I don't
> necessarily expect an answer to that.

I can certainly remember my own learning curve with emacs.  Only now I
can meaningfully advocate for something that would have helped me years
ago.

I can come up with a patch that also considers current recommendations
for add-to-list.  Right now, I have too many other things on my plate.
But I should be able to submit a patch for review around end of next
month.