Re: autoload

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 09/13/2015 07:38 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> Would it make more sense written like ${^fpath} ?  It's the operator
> that causes an array (a b c) to expand to e.g. a/* b/* c/* instead of
> to a b c/* -- cf. the rc_expand_param setopt.
Yikes, that's brand new to me, I only know the caret as negation. So 
this is a feature
specific--it seems--to getting useful path expansion.  Just echoing some 
dirs, I get the
point loud and clear. That's powerful.
> (N) means nonomatch, so empty directories disappear from the result
> instead of causing a globbing error.  (-) is follow symlinks, so that
> combined with (N) any dangling symlinks also disappear.  These both are
> documented in the "Glob Qualifiers" subsection of the manual.

Nuts, I scanned that page top to bottom looking at random, and there it 
is near the
very bottom. 'NULL_GLOB' it says.  Thanks for the explanation.
> Well, yes, but that only autoloads Sebastian's navigation functions
> (and any others whose names happen to start with "n-").

Of course, I'm just experimenting for now.  Getting the feel ...
> You don't autoload from a location, you autoload a name and the fpath
> is searched for it.
Ah! ... I'm subconsciously thinking in terms of finding commands. No!

    autoload /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions/n-*(N-.:t)


... is a kind of trick--we are grabbing the names of files and using 
them as the names of
functions to be found later, but we are NOT actually passing 
definitions.  Yes?

     autoload n-list n-cd n-env n-kill n-panelize n-options n-aliases 
n-functions n-history n-preview

... is actually more 'honest' since all autoload really knows at that 
point is names.  Definitions
will be retrieved later. Yes?

> (zcompile on the other hand DOES load from locations rather than from
> a path search, so if you use zcompile + autoload -w you get the path
> stripping.)
>
Sounds like a good idea, would that not be preferable?  Why not prime 
the pump with both the name and the location?  I'm over my head of 
course, but it seems that the '(...(N-.:t)' style command could notify 
autoload of both name and location in one go thus obviating the need to 
rummage through $fpath.  As always, if that's not done there will be a 
good reason.