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Re: hook? primitive
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