Re: emacs and guile (Re: ehelp woes, or why I hate a module that I love so much)

[Richard Stallman]

    My approach last time around was to add a SCM field to most of the
    "interesting" data types (symbol, misc, and vectorlike), fill it in
    when the object was created, and make XSETFOO just copy the value out.
    Rather crude, and wasteful of storage space, but it got the job done,
    and it minimized the intrusion in random Emacs code and kept it
    running with both object representations.

I don't think this method makes real sense, because if an object is
going to have the scheme object header at all, we may as well use that
object header universaly throughout Emacs as the way to reference the
object.  It would cost no extra storage, and it would be simpler.

The place where having this extra baggage is really unfortunate is for
the small data types--symbol and Lisp_Misc.  Perhaps Scheme needs
a new facility for small user data types.

Why can't Guile's symbols be used as Lisp symbols?