Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!porthos.rutgers.edu!gaynor
From: gaynor@porthos.rutgers.edu (Silver)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: providing features
Keywords: require, provide, featurep
Message-ID: <Oct.28.03.19.36.1988.2794@porthos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 28 Oct 88 07:19:37 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 20


require and provide are a clean way of making sure things are loaded when you
want them.  However, they are not used nearly as much as they could be.  Is
there any kind of reorganization of the libraries going on for the next version?
I recommend that an effort be made to rely upon require and provide for
conditional loading of material.  They ARE rather nice...

For instance, when I want to modify prolog-mode-map in my .emacs (or something
else for which a hook isn't really applicable), it is much cleaner to say

  (require 'prolog)
  (define-key mumble ...)

than

  (or (boundp 'prolog-mode-map)
      (load "prolog"))
  (define-key mumble ...)

Regards, [Ag] gaynor@rutgers.edu