Byte-compiled ChangeLog

My dot emacs file is divided into .el pieces like this:

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(load "~/.emacs/conf/env_internal.el")
(load "~/.emacs/conf/env_external.el")
(load "~/.emacs/conf/ui.el")
; ...

It's much easier to deal with functions grouped in different files rather than functions in one big .emacs.el.

The following "trick" automatically byte-compiles .el files as they're being saved in Emacs:

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(defun autocompile nil
  (interactive)
  (require 'bytecomp)
  (if (numberp (string-match ".el" buffer-file-name))
        (byte-compile-file (buffer-file-name))))

(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'autocompile)

It worked perfect for me, until once I was updating a single ChangeLog file via Emacs. When I saved it, Emacs tried to byte-compile the file! That was weird.

The error should have not been in Emacs (that's true for 99.9% Emacs-related "bugs"), but somewhere in one of my configuration .el files. And probably there was something wrong with the byte-compile-on-save hook. The only function that could cause it was:

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(if (numberp (string-match ".el" buffer-file-name))

Let's see what Emacs says about the string-match() function:

(string-match regexp string & optional start)

Returns the index of start of the first match for regexp in string, or nil.

So, string-match() works with regexps! And I have the "." symbol in the pattern. But period stands for a special character in regexps:

'.' (Period) is a special character that matches any single character except a newline. Using concatenation, we can make regular expressions like 'a.b', which matches any three-character string that begins with 'a' and ends with 'b'.

—Emacs help

So, (string-match ".el" buffer-file-name) function call is wrong! For example:

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(string-match ".el" "ChangeLog")

returns 4.

I had to use a backslash to quote that period, like this:

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(string-match "\.el" "ChangeLog")

But somehow, that didn't work either. An additional documentation exploration had shown that

When you use regular expressions in a Lisp program, each '\' must be doubled.

—Emacs help

Finally, I tried:

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(string-match "\\.el" "ChangeLog")

And it worked! The result was nil. And the result for any file with .el extension was the start position of the ".el" string in file's name.

Here is the final version for automatic byte-compile when saving a file with .el extension:

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(defun autocompile nil
  "compile itself if contains .el"
  (interactive)
  (require 'bytecomp)
  (if (numberp (string-match "\\.el" buffer-file-name))
      (byte-compile-file (buffer-file-name))))

(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'autocompile)

That was a funny problem and it took me about half an hour to deal with. Emacs help helps :)