Re: emacs with guile instead of elisp

[mike@olan.com (Michael N. Livshin)]

Andrew Archibald <aarchiba@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> writes:

> I think we may always want to undump just before execution --- as well
> as separate compilation.  But regardless, it is important that it be
> possible to store precomputed results in an easy-to-load form.  And
> unfortunately, this form probably includes smobs (eg, compiled
> regexps).

You need a more 'static' module system to guarantee that the
precomputed stuff won't change.  Or do you?

As for smobs, I think they are really a pain with regards to
compilation.  Also, as I see it, all the things which use smobs now
could use some static 'define-record-type' thingie (on the Scheme
level).

FWIW, I hear that the record facility was rejected by the R*RS
committee because the record types can be generated dynamically,
defeating any type-inference optimizations.

As for C, it should be possible to have user-defined types tagged with
pointers instead of dynamically-assigned numbers.

So, instead of:

long scm_tc16_my_type_id;
...
        SCM_NEWCELL(z);
        SCM_SETCAR(z, scm_tc16_my_type_id);
        SCM_SETCDR(z, stuff);
...
scm_tc16_my_type_id = scm_newsmob(&my_smob);

You could say:

char * my_type_id = "mumble";
...
        SCM_NEWCELL(z);
        SCM_SETCAR(z, (long)my_type_id);
        SCM_SETCDR(z, stuff);

If this doesn't work now (or has no chance of working ever, or is
wrong for some deep reason), I'd like to know why.

mike.