[OS X Emacs] map-query-replace-regexp: why?

Jack Repenning jrepenning at collab.net
Thu Sep 30 13:25:23 EDT 2010


On Sep 30, 2010, at 9:14 AM, Enrico Franconi wrote:

> This goes back to a typical lisp programming pattern, familiar to the older among us who did a lot of lisp programming in their youth :-)

Well, yeah, I recognize the pattern, and was writing lisp when people still got huffy about spelling it LISP ;-). But even AI programmers usually have a *reason* for doing something! I also find it odd that, despite its name, this routine doesn't really follow the LISP/lisp/e-lisp "map" pattern, in that the "list" of values to map in is actually presented as a space-delimited string, not an actual, you know ... *list*. That seems an odd choice to this old cons-er, and also seems to force the substitutions to be space-free, an odd presumption in a text editor, which once again seems to imply some very specific purpose. Which I can't, for the life of me, guess.









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