> It is consistency between argument names in docstrings vs argument > names in the Emacs Lisp Reference a goal? > > Yes, more or less. It is not necessary to fix all such discrepancies, > but in many cases fixing them would be a step forward. When doing so, > it is important to standardize on the better name, not the worse one.
While looking recently at minibuffer reading functions, I noticed that not only argument names in the Emacs Lisp Reference and docstrings of each function don't match, but even similar arguments have different names in related functions. It is misleading when documentation refers to a similar argument of another function, but it has a different name. Below is a list of arguments with similar names of minibuffer functions collected from docstrings and descriptions in the Emacs Lisp Reference: prompt, prompt-string initial, initial-contents, initial-input history, hist def, defalt, default, default-value, default-filename, default-dirname inherit-input-method require-match, mustmatch, must-match, existing collection, table, alist nospace, hide-spaces directory, dir I propose to standardize on the following arguments names: prompt initial history defaults inherit-im must-match collection no-space directory Most of these names are shorter than current names, but still intelligible. Since `default' is a keyword in C, `defaults' is a good replacement. `inherit-im' is twice shorter than `inherit-input-method' and the `IM' abbreviation is already mentioned in the Emacs manual. -- Juri Linkov http://www.jurta.org/emacs/ _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
