On this SE, does a duplicate answer necessarily imply a duplicate question?

Question

Earlier today I asked this question and received an answer in comments. I suggested the commenter post the comment as an answer, and another commenter said not to do that because my question was a duplicate of this not at all obviously related question. And apparently several other questions that commenter admitted had “misleading titles”.

I might be new to Emacs.SE, but I’m not at all new to SE in general, and I did spent considerable time trying to find an existing answer to what seemed like an obvious question before posting my version of it. If there’s a question here that poses the problem in the same form I did, I’ll happily call it a duplicate. Or if the purpose of this SE is to help primarily the kind of serious elisp hacker to whom it’s intuitively obvious that binding a keystroke to a lambda is the same operation as making a function into a command.

Otherwise, I think providing more paths to an answer and more meaningfully different search keywords for a given piece of information—meaningfully different to the searcher, at least—is adding information, not noise.

It seems to me that on other SE sites a closely related answer doesn’t necessarily imply the questions are referentially transparent. But perhaps those other SEs aren’t purely functional enough?

Answer 1

On this site, like any other SE site, a good rule of thumb is that question 2 is a duplicate of question 1 if any good answer to question 1 is also a good answer to question 2.

If there is an answer that applies to two questions, it's often a sign that they're duplicates, but not always. For example, sometimes a general solution applies to multiple scenarios, but a specific scenario may have other solutions that don't always apply.

Questions don't have to be word-for-word identical in order to be duplicates, or even to have word-for-word identical answers. For example, your question is generically “how do I define a function and make it a available for M-x”. It doesn't matter what the function does, and therefore your question is a duplicate of our generic question on the topic (which was posted after yours). On the other hand, I don't see how your question would be a duplicate of Bind `C-x 8 l` to typing lambda (λ). While this question does involve making a function available as a command, there are other things in play, because that other question isn't primarily about making a function available as a command, it's about making a key insert a particular character, and there are other ways to do that.