Re: The Guile junk drawer and a C plea

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
> <richard@freakingpenguin.com> wrote:
>> I will suggest that if a consensus is reached on what new code must
>> adhere to (e.g. no (guile) namespace pollution, no new procedures
>> written in C), it should be documented in the reference manual.
>
> Right, there is no consensus about this right now.

If there were consensus, there would be less talk about it :-)

>> In the specific context of this patch I feel like the risks of namespace
>> pollution and C maintenance burden are low since both are near identical
>> to what already exists.
>
> I agree that the risks are low in this case. It doesn't make sense to
> have destructive list operations without nondestructive equivalents,
> especially since mutation of pairs is strongly discouraged amongst
> seasoned Schemers.  If it were my call (and it's not, to be clear),
> I'd say that they should just be implemented in Scheme, at least.
> There really is no good reason to implement Scheme procedures in C
> anymore.

I think harmonizing the existing codebase and moving to Scheme should be
seen as orthogonal.

This does not increase the work when moving delete to Scheme by much
(asking in the conversion "was there a good reason not to have a
non-mutating version" might actually take up more time than just doing
the conversion alongside), so I would suggest to merge the patch.

There are nuances which could turn harmonizing into expanding the C in
the codebase (and thus creating a moving target for reducing the C
core), but I think this patch is purely harmonizing

>> It's quite possible as a first-time contributor I am missing something
>> that already exists. If so, oops again!
>
> Nope! Not missing a thing. There's literally no way for you to know
> that there's a desire amongst some Guilers to discourage implementing
> new standard library procedures in C and expanding the default
> namespace.

> I really hope I haven't discouraged you from future contributions by
> using your patch as a case study. Thank you again for hacking on
> Guile!

I want to second this: thank you for your patch!

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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