arbiters and smobs in general

[Dirk Herrmann <dirk at ida dot ing dot tu-bs dot de>]

Hi!

Currently, arbiters are implemented as a smob, where the 16th type bit is
used to determine whether the arbiter is in locked state.  The cdr of the
smob, however, holds a name for the arbiter, which is never used but for
printing.

I don't know if anybody uses arbiters, but since there is no way to access
the name part of the smob (at least the interface in arbiters.h is very
small, fortunately!) I suggest to get rid of that name part and store the
state of the arbiter in the cdr.

The name parameter to the constructor make-arbiter could either be
completely removed, or accepted and ignored.


Further, the SCM_VALIDATE_SMOB macro assumes that the variable holding the
smob type is prefixed with scm_tc16_.  I would suggest to change this such
that either no prefix is assumed or that a more general prefix be used,
which does not already imply an implementation of the smob type space.

Best regards
Dirk Herrmann