Over at Emacs Redux, the ever informative Bozhidar Batsov has a couple more posts up in his series on the upcoming Emacs 24.4 release. The first concerns new string manipulation functions. It’s odd that Emacs has been historically deficient in this area. Magnar Sveen’s excellent s.el has helped fill in the gap and is still more comprehensive than the functions added to the Emacs core but it’s encouraging that new string functions are being included. I hope we see a unification down the road.
Batsov’s second post discusses a couple of additions to the hash table functions. These functions, hash-table-keys and hash-table-values, returns lists of the keys and values in a given hash table. As with Common Lisp, you could always get at these using the maphash function but it’s nice to have some ready made functions. A lot of Elisp functions take a list as input and these functions are a handy way of getting lists of hash keys or values directly without an intermediate step involving maphash.
As with Batsov’s previous posts, these make me look forward to the new Emacs release. We’re already in feature freeze and should be seeing the first release candidate shortly.