Re: Discussing Guile and revising interfaces

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:

> If we developed Guile in a different way, by designing and
> writing specs, and then implementing it, it would be easier to know
> ahead.  If you're interested in the interface issue, I'd prefer if we
> started working on a document specifying Guile's future interfaces.
> Such a document could be used to guide development, and before that it
> is easy to make changes without bad consequences.

BTW, the maintainers have considered implementing the following
process:

Instead of changing Guile's interface directly (for example by
deprecating functions) we plan to systematically go through the entire
Guile API by making annotations in the reference manual.  We would add
notes such as "OK", "needs to change this way...", "consider ..."
etc.  Such notes could be conditional in the manual, so that they
wouldn't appear until you set a flag when compiling it.

On the Scheme level, we would check that procedures have a
theoretically sound interface and doesn't make type inference
impossible, etc.