RFC: User-defined pseudovectors

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Hello,

With the current FFI discussion, this may be a good time to ask for
input on a Lisp extension I have lying around.

Some FFI bindings may want to introduce new Lisp types.  My idea is
that this should be possible to do in Lisp, not just in C.  This might
also be useful in other situations, e.g.

- Future new pseudovector types can be defined in Lisp.

- Lisp code can potentially interoperate more easily with code in
other languages.  Existing languages for Emacs include JavaScript
(Ejacs), Python (Pymacs), Ruby (El4r), Perl (EPL), Smalltalk (Eoops),
Common Lisp (Emacs Common Lisp).

- Possibly cl-defstruct can be extended to make new types if so requested.

The gist of my patch is to add a new type of pseudovector which is
like a normal vector, except the first element holds a symbol which is
its Lisp type.  So type-of returns whatever is in the first slot.
This may sound slightly reckless, and probably is.  It's just a first
shot.

Sample session:

(let ((x (make-typed-pseudovector 3 'foo nil)))
  (aset x 1 1)
  (aset x 2 2)
  (aset x 3 3)
  (list (read-from-string (with-output-to-string (prin1 x)))
        (typed-pseudovector-p x)
        (type-of x)
        (aref x 0)
        (aref x 3)
        (length x)))

 => ((#%[foo 1 2 3] . 13) t foo foo 3 4)