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

[Ken Raeburn]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> Our goal is to support Scheme, but this doesn't mean we have to be
> purists about how we do it.

True, and I'm not saying that changing Guile in a Lisp-specific way is
the wrong approach.  I'm just not convinced it's necessary, and I'm a
bit more hesitant than some others to charge ahead and do it.  If we
can do it cleanly and efficiently in "real" Scheme, I think that
would be preferable.

>    We can bring Guile "up to the task" by
> adding a facility to add extra slots to a symbol, for
> application-specific purposes.  Rather than a kludge for Emacs, this
> will be a general Guile feature with wider usefulness.

I recall thinking once upon a time about using symbol properties.
Guile has object properties in general, implemented through a weak
hash table, but adding a property field to a symbol for performance
may be a reasonable change.  (Though I think a property-list field was
taken *out* of some object type a while back; I don't remember if it
was symbols.)  Then the extra Lisp-related data can be stored as one
or more properties.