Make Flet Great Again

Do you long for the days before Emacs 24.3 when flet was dynamically scoped? Well, you probably shouldn’t since there are some very good reasons lexical scope. But, still, a dynamically scoped flet is situationally really useful, particularly in unit testing. The good news is that it’s trivial to get this original behavior back without relying on deprecated functions nor third-party packages.

But first, what is flet and what does it mean for it to be dynamically scoped? The name stands for “function let” (or something to that effect). It’s a macro to bind named functions within a local scope, just as let binds variables within some local scope. It’s provided by the now-deprecated cl package.

(require 'cl)  ; deprecated!

(defun norm (x y)
  (flet ((square (v) (* v v)))
    (sqrt (+ (square x) (square y)))))

However, a gotcha here is that square is visible not just to the body of norm but also to any function called directly or indirectly from the flet body. That’s dynamic scope.

(flet ((sqrt (v) (/ v 2)))  ; close enough
  (norm 2 2))
;; -> 4

Note: This works because sqrt hasn’t (yet?) been assigned a bytecode opcode. One weakness with flet is that, due to being dynamically scoped, it is unable to define or override functions whose calls evaporate under byte compilation. For example, addition:

(defun add-with-flet ()
  (flet ((+ (&rest _) :override))
    (+ 1 2 3)))

(add-with-flet)
;; -> :override

(funcall (byte-compile #'add-with-flet))
;; -> 6

Since + has its own opcode, the function call is eliminated under byte-compilation and flet can’t do its job. This is similar these same functions being unadvisable.

cl-lib and cl-flet

The cl-lib package introduced in Emacs 24.3, replacing cl, adds a namespace prefix, cl-, to all of these Common Lisp style functions. In most cases this was the only change. One exception is cl-flet, which has different semantics: It’s lexically scoped, just like in Common Lisp. Its bindings aren’t visible outside of the cl-flet body.

(require 'cl-lib)

(cl-flet ((sqrt (v) (/ v 2)))
  (norm 2 2))
;; -> 2.8284271247461903

In most cases this is what you actually want. The old flet subtly changes the environment for all functions called directly or indirectly from its body.

Besides being cleaner and less error prone, cl-flet also doesn’t have special exceptions for functions with assigned opcodes. At macro-expansion time it walks the body, taking its action before the byte-compiler can interfere.

(defun add-with-cl-flet ()
  (cl-flet ((+ (&rest _) :override))
    (+ 1 2 3)))

(add-with-cl-flet)
;; -> :override

(funcall (byte-compile #'add-with-cl-flet))
;; -> :override

In order for it to work properly, it’s essential that functions are quoted with sharp-quotes (#') so that the macro can tell the difference between functions and symbols. Just make a general habit of sharp-quoting functions.

In unit testing, temporarily overriding functions for all of Emacs is useful, so flet still has some uses. But it’s deprecated!

Unit testing with flet

Since Emacs can do anything, suppose there is an Emacs package that makes sandwiches. In this package there’s an interactive function to set the default sandwich cheese.

(defvar default-cheese 'cheddar)

(defun set-default-cheese (type)
  (interactive
   (let* ((options '("cheddar" "swiss" "american"))
          (input (completing-read "Cheese: " options nil t)))
     (when input
       (list (intern input)))))
  (setf default-cheese type))

Since it’s interactive, it uses completing-read to prompt the user for input. A unit test could call this function non-interactively, but perhaps we’d also like to test the interactive path. The code inside interactive occasionally gets messy and may warrant testing. It would obviously be inconvenient to prompt the user for input during testing, and it wouldn’t work at all in batch mode (-batch).

With flet we can stub out completing-read just for the unit test:

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

(ert-deftest test-set-default-cheese ()
  ;; protect original with dynamic binding
  (let (default-cheese)
    ;; simulate user entering "american"
    (flet ((completing-read (&rest _) "american"))
      (call-interactively #'set-default-cheese)
      (should (eq 'american default-cheese)))))

Since default-cheese was defined with defvar, it will be dynamically scoped despite let normally using lexical scope in this example. Both of the side effects of the tested function — setting a global variable and prompting the user — are captured using a combination of let and flet.

Since cl-flet is lexically scoped, it cannot serve this purpose. If flet is deprecated and cl-flet can’t do the job, what’s the right way to fix it? The answer lies in generalized variables.

cl-letf

What’s really happening inside flet is it’s globally binding a function name to a different function, evaluating the body, and rebinding it back to the original definition when the body completes. It macro-expands to something like this:

(let ((original (symbol-function 'completing-read)))
  (setf (symbol-function 'completing-read)
        (lambda (&rest _) "american"))
  (unwind-protect
      (call-interactively #'set-default-cheese)
    (setf (symbol-function 'completing-read) original)))

The unwind-protect ensures the original function is rebound even if the body of the call were to fail. This is very much a let-like pattern, and I’m using symbol-function as a generalized variable via setf. Is there a generalized variable version of let?

Yes! It’s called cl-letf! In this case the f suffix is analogous to the f suffix in setf. That form above can be reduced to a more general form:

(cl-letf (((symbol-function 'completing-read)
           (lambda (&rest _) "american")))
  (call-interactively #'set-default-cheese))

And that’s the way to reproduce the dynamically scoped behavior of flet since Emacs 24.3. There’s nothing complicated about it.

(ert-deftest test-set-default-cheese ()
  (let (default-cheese)
    (cl-letf (((symbol-function 'completing-read)
               (lambda (&rest _) "american")))
      (call-interactively #'set-default-cheese)
      (should (eq 'american default-cheese)))))

Keep in mind that this suffers the exact same problem with bytecode-assigned functions as flet, and for exactly the same reasons. If completing-read were to ever be assigned its own opcode then cl-letf would no longer work for this particular example.

• emacs
• elisp