Re: My thoughts on the Gnus source code

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> writes:

> On Feb 13 2016, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>> Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org> writes:
>>

[...]

>> 1. I don't think there's anything inherently unsuitable about Elisp for
>>    writing a MUA (or any other type of software). It's a general
>>    programming language, a little different from Python or other more
>>    popular languages, but it comes with a full complement of modern
>>    programming features.
>
> You may be right. But I think in that case the relevant modern
> programming features have a bit of a visibility problem. They are rarely
> found in existing code (probably because most of it predates them), and
> there also don't feature prominently in the "Emacs Lisp Reference
> Manual".

That's definitely fair to say. And I think Emacs development energy gets
split between "making Elisp a better language" and "making Emacs a
better editor". But the tools are there.

[...]

> I don't object to using buffers at all, I object to using them to pass
> data around between functions. For example, I think a much better format
> to pass around message headers would be a list of alists. That way, if a
> function wants to access a specific header it doesn't have to
> re-implement RFC822 parsing but it simply uses assq et al. And even
> better, if I messed up and passed a buffer containing a full message
> instead of a sequence of headers, things are going to fail loudly
> instead of weird things happening silently.
>
>>    I understand there are such things out there as Real
>>    Parsers, and that they're difficult to write, and that maybe we could
>>    benefit by having one
>
> That's why you don't write the parser, but use a parser generator
> :-). 

Apparently we have not one but two parser generators! Have you looked at
the manuals for Bovine and Wisent? Bovine claims to be the simpler of
the two. The manuals seem quite geared towards parsing source code
buffers, but maybe they would do just as well for parsing IMAP server
output? It's not something I know much about (it's also not my
particular itch!).