Re: hook? primitive

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj-pc.nada.kth.se>]

Greg Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu> writes:

> > I'm not convinced that hook-arity is useful enough to balance the
> > costs of increased complexity.
> 
> But the printable form even includes the arity in it.  The bottom line
> is: users of guile are going to use:
> 
> (cadr some-random-hook)
> 
> to get at the hook arity.  To provide a reasonable abstraction of hooks, 
> that implementation detail needs to be hidden behind a provided
> procedure.

Yes.  During the move from the old to the new interface we had a
representation which was accessible from the Scheme level.  (The old
interface was written in Scheme.)

Since we have removed the old interface, we can now modify the
representation to be a real type.

> P.S.  What complexity?  It's a simple accessor primitive that can be
> orthogonally ignored, if desired.

I'm trying to adhere to a policy of only adding useful primitives in
order to keep the total size down.  One more or less may not matter.
The real problem is that if you say "It's a simple accessor" too many
times, Guile will grow too much.

In my view, Guile already is too complex.  I think we should remove
primitives instead of adding new.  :)

Note that more primitives means

 * a larger libguile
 * a heavier manual
 * longer reading time and more to think about
 * more administration for the interpreter
 * more memory usage