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>> Would that be considered bad style from the original author, or is that >> up to personal choice and not considered a problem? >> > > Not a problem - you can't predict the future. You do the best you can > with your current knowledge. You can always refactor in the future: > that's one reason that having the source code around is important. When > you refactor, you may be cursing the original author for the "bad" > decicions, but c'est la vie: at least, you have chosen a system where > *you* can do that and not depend on a third party: they might not even > be alive, let alone willing to do what you want. I think this is probably the key. As a non-professional programmer who has gone on safari through the org-mode code (though this obviously applies to a lot of elisp packages), I think incremental growth is responsible for a lot of oddities. Refactoring is possible in theory, but for fast-growing packages it never becomes a priority, and my guess is by this point there are parts of org where even Carsten would tread very lightly. It's not a disaster, but it does lead to regression bugs, which I think we're seeing. Entropy is contravened, however: witness the push towards an org test suite, and the production of a generic exporter in org… Slightly OT, sorry, Eric -- GNU Emacs 24.0.90.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.4) of 2011-10-06 on pellet Org-mode version 7.7 (release_7.7.466.ga5cb)
