Re: dangerous apply

[Tom Lord <lord@emf.net>]

	> 	The current policy is to strive towards an interpreter which
	>	cannot be crashed from the Scheme level.
	>
	> That statement is impossible to interpret without knowing what you 
	> mean by "the Scheme level".  What do you mean?

	With "the Scheme level" I mean expressions typed in at the repl
	prompt, loaded from files, or passed to Guile from the application
	program.

That's very ambitious.

Perhaps a simpler goal is to make it so that you can't crash the
interpreter _casually_: meaning that you won't crash it unless you do
something that is obviously dangerous and that you don't ever have to
do anything obviously dangerous unless you are an "expert" hacking the
deepest internals of something.  You'd have to come up with a more
precise definition of "casually".  You'd want to have some mechanism
(like a module) to ordinarilly keep the dangerous stuff inaccessible.

The point is to relax the constraints that are forcing you to do extra
work and slow-down the interpreter (like getting rid of dangerous
"apply") without relaxing the constraint that you present end-users
with a warm fluffy extra-safe Scheme environment.

-t