[asdf-devel] New ASDF maintainer sought

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 4:27 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon <
pjb at informatimago.com> wrote:

> But when you have a smart editor such as emacs, with at least a good
> search function, or even a find-tag feature, it doesn't really matter
> where your functions are stored.


I use emacs, and I am not thinking about searching functions, which has been
also repeated to me privately as a reason (!) to have everything in one
file, but rather in organizing the code and giving it a navigational
structure. I find it useful at least for myself to split things into
directories according to their role, group functions that belong together at
least in my mind and work only on a small set of files at a time.

That said, there are times when this is impossible, as it is the problem
with ECL, which has humongous files with hundreds of functions per-file. In
this case there are two issues at stake, one is that C only makes optimal
function calls to functions in the same file (maybe that changes with new
link time optimizers) and the other one is to avoid exporting symbols.

Actually, file management should be
> left up to the system and the programmer should not care about the
> storage of their functions.  Like in Smalltalk for example.  So
> instead of dealing with a linear sequence of functions, you can rather
> work on a tree or graph of functions, and navigate from one to the
> other directly.
>

Sorry, but I always found Smalltalk's way of working confusing. You just
throw everything in a huge, deep, dark bag and everything is at your hand's
reach, but that does not mean one gets a really organized project out of it.
For me programs are more than just a collection of functions, but that is my
personal taste.


> That said, I too like to have things gathered up in a somewhat
> organized way, so that I may browse and revise the code in a
> meaningful way.  But there are probably better ways to do it.  In
> particular when you consider multiple dispatch in CLOS, you could have
> several ways to sort out the methods, depending on what you're doing.
>

My point is that even if there are many ways to do so, one of them imprints
the actual view of the library or program organization. Using code layout as
information for newcomers is fine and that is what I am trying to do --
being kind of a newcomer to lots of ASDF parts.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
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