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Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 13:36:43 -0500 From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> Cc: guile@cygnus.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Length: 840 >Indeed, and thee is a nice pattern matching system available for >Scheme, written by Andrew Wright and Bruce Duba. Cool! >The package is written using itself, so you need to use a ``compiled'' >version. *puke* That is the kind of cutesy crap that really gets my goat. Suppose I find a bug? How can I fix it? I can only rebuild my fixed version with the buggy version, and there's no way of knowing whether the bug interacts with the fix without pawing through the raw expanded code. Oh, it has no bugs, didn't you know that? It was written in Scheme! Oh, you *changed* it... Well, people who write bugs should suffer. Then they won't do it again. (To be fair, I don't mean to single out Wright and Duba. But Schemers in general just seem to lap this stuff up. It's idiocy. "Reflection" does not mean "Navel Contemplation".) Well, this is a time honored tradition for language development, and serves several real purposes. For one thing, it provides a first level test of correctness, which is important for pattern matching code, I think. It also makes the implementation easier if you can use the power of the package itself. And, given a working version, it makes generating new versions quite simple. The package is small anyway, and the compiled files are very nearly standard Scheme, so I don't really see this as a problem. -- Clifford Beshers Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab beshers@cs.columbia.edu Department of Computer Science http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~beshers Columbia University