Re: Kill the SCM_NIMPs

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

Dirk Herrmann <dirk@ida.ing.tu-bs.de> writes:

> I apologise that my mail sounded as if I wanted to pick on anybody.

(Well, it might be that I'm a bit sensitized to this entire issue. :)

> Since the change may potentially cause performance degradation, it
> would probably be best to test that first.

There is of course a limit when one can be sure enough that the
effects of a change doesn't have an impact that one can go about doing
it without wasting energy on benchmarks.  For me, this limit goes when
one doesn't add extra instructions in time critical code.  The
question whether to use SCM_NIMP or SCM_NNULLP at one place is beyond
that limit.

I think your suggested change is good, because it makes the semantics
clearer.  There's no reason to benchmark it, but, as I said before,
this is a kind of change that should be performed everywhere, since it
is a question of a change of convention.

/mdj