Re: Orphaned symbols?

[sigurd@12move.de (Karl Pflästerer)]

On 13 Feb 2004, Jesper Harder <- harder@ifa.au.dk wrote:

> I don't think these are used:

[Variables]

> But it's not necessarily trivial to tell, because you can reference a
> variable by constructing the name dynamically -- that's the case for
> some of the ones you listed.

Yes; especially in gnus-article that's used heavily (the functions are
defined with out gnus- prefix and it's added somewhere); not very nice.

> These aren't actually used:

> | ietf-drums-dot-atext-token -> ietf-drums.el
> | ietf-drums-qtext-token -> ietf-drums.el
> | ietf-drums-quote-token -> ietf-drums.el
> | ietf-drums-specials-token -> ietf-drums.el

> but it makes sense to keep them.  They were probably included to
> define all the BNF tokens in the RFC.

Is there no possibility to decide which variables could safely be
deleted?  Some of the vars I found aren't used anywhere; they make it
only harder to understand the code.  I also find a bunch of functions
which are only defined but never used (for them it's even harder to
decide if they don't get somewhere defined dynamically).  If we never
try to find them we will have garbage in the code.


   KP

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