elves
Supporting introspecting $E: as if it were a normal namespace
I was converting my fish functions for modifying my Anaconda virtual environment and was surprised to find I could not do keys $E: or has-key $E: MY-ENV-VAR. Is there some other way to iterate over, or test for the existence of a key, in that namespace? Note that relying on $E:vname expanding to an empty string is not the same thing as knowing if the env var is set, even if set to the empty string.
Treating the $e: namespace (external commands) like other namespaces might be a bridge too far because you can already do the equivalent of has-key $e: prog via has-external prog. However, I would argue that has-external is redundant if you can treat $e: as a read-only Elvish map usable by has-key and keys.
Regarding the e: namespace for external commands. Note that if it could be treated like a readonly Elvish map then doing $e[a_command] would evaluate to the command path that would be used if you ran e:a_command. That would be extremely useful.
The has-env command does exist, and mitigitates this issue a bit, just as has-external does for the e: name space.
Also as for the immediately preceding comment, search-external already does that.
But still, I agree that it could be handy to have e: and E: behave more like other namespaces. Personally, I'd like to even see the top-level interactive name space in the same way, but that is perhaps because I am a big fan of introspective capabilities (even if there is always a potential for misuse).
Thanks, @hanche, as I had overlooked the has-env and search-external commands. Nonetheless, I think we both agree the magic builtin namespaces, such as e: and E:, shouldn't behave differently from a namespace created by the use command. Specifically with respect to builtins like keys, has-key, and indexing into the namespace.
I was too lazy to implement introspection operations on $E: (it doesn't even exist), but someone (or I, eventually) should do that, and remove the *-env builtin functions (after deprecation).
FWIW, namespaces and maps are distinct types in Elvish. Namespaces are reference types with a fixed set of keys while maps are value types.
