Should marking a system preloaded drop its build information?

[Daniel Kochmański]

Faré writes:

>> Rationale for registering a new system is as follows: preloaded-systems
>> and immutable-systems are separate kind of system treated differently in
>> the code and have a separate class, because of their very nature.
>>
> I don't buy that. Immutable systems could be made thus by adding a
> slot immutable-p to all systems. The reason we're using a table
> instead is because we want fast access to the list of only those
> systems that are immutable without groveling a large list of all the
> defined systems, that most usually aren't. At which point we don't
> need the slot.

I believe it would be improvement upon current design (explicit
consulting with separate hash tables, special cases in the code, calling
something a xxx-system while it's in fact xxx-flagged-system). I'm not
insisting on that change, since the issue which made me work on that is
(mostly, if not entirely) solved.

Either way I think that at least removing immutability flag from the
system should be abstracted by a protocol (i.e
`deregister-immutable-system' or something of this kind) instead of
calling remhash. This will make such desing changes possible in the
future if someone will find it important without breaking the backward
compatibility.
>
>> [To preserve the build information] an instance could store the original system in
>> a slot, which gets registered during the call to
>> `deregister-immutable-system'.
>>
> If you preserve the build information, why change the system object at all?
>
> You seem all set on defining new classes for preloaded and immutable systems,
> but don't explain why it's useful, just offer workaround for all the
> detrimental effects
> of the design.
>

You said it, it's desirable to not carry build information exposed in
non-development host, but getting rid of the data isn't much so. Such
solution keeps both qualities.
> —♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
> I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs — Dick Sites

Regards,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel Kochmański ;; aka jackdaniel | Poznań, Poland
TurtleWare - Daniel Kochmański      | www.turtleware.eu

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi