> I think this is a waste of time. These functions are already very
> short; making them shorter will not significantly improve readability.
> It'll just force people who think they know what that code does to
> look at it again to see if it still does the same thing.
>
> Let's spend our time arguing about changes that matter. There are an
> infinite number of things like this that you could tinker with, but
> most of them are not worth tinkering with.
I must respectfully disagree. Granted, this is not a big issue and
we don't have to fix it right now. Probably next commit fest would be a
better time.
But this is not a huge patch that changing everything in unpredictable
way and requires a lot of hard thinking. We also have code review,
regression tests, alpha and beta tests to be reasonably sure that such
change doesn't break anything. (If not perhaps we should improve this
situation by introducing new ways of modular and property-based
testing, which I believe would be extremely useful say in case of
indexes, but this is a different story).
I don't believe we can afford to keep such a confusing code using
provided arguments as an excuse not to fixing it. ("OK, there are two
procedures that work differently... lets see... or not? well, thats
odd... lets make :vsplit and compare them line by line... damn, I spend
all that time to figure out that they are the same!") Otherwise such
"broken windows" will accumulate until it become a _real_ problem.
As we know from experience, to that time it's usually much harder to
fix anything than it is now.
--
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev
http://eax.me/