read-depend branch is ready for another review...

[Faré]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
> On 7/16/17 Jul 16 -10:31 PM, Faré wrote:
>>>> 1. what's in FIND-SYSTEM is accessors to %ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES, not
>>>> ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES and the former has setters as well as getters, so
>>>> I wasn't sure I could use ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES.  I'll check.
>>>
>>> Checked and confirmed this -- %ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES takes only a
>>> COMPONENT as argument, so it can't use the convenience methods macro.
>>>
>> Why do you need convenience methods for the internal accessor
>> %ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES ? Can't users who need convenience methods
>> (including internal functions) just use ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES, and
>> let *its* convenience methods do the trick?
>
> I was just being lazy, but I definitely found that the raw accessor was
> being called with strings.  Our code structure doesn't make it easy to
> be tidy about this.
>
The function didn't exist before, you are introducing it. Why do you
call it with strings? Shouldn't this function always be hidden behind
a call to ADDITIONAL-INPUT-FILES, that does have convenience
methods???

> The very presence of the action convenience files
> encourages being haphazard about typing, and the fact that CL gives us
> next to no compile time support makes it worse.  Even if I track down
> all the callers and do the type correction myself, the next time someone
> calls it (since we have effectively told the programmer "it's ok to use
> component and action designators everywhere" by having arguments called
> ACTION and COMPONENT that actually mean ACTION-DESIGNATOR and
> COMPONENT-DESIGNATOR), we could be back in the soup.
>
> I can fix this, but I think its symptomatic of a real maintenance issue.
>
Convenience functions are fine for API functions; just not for
internals that ought to be hidden behind API functions anyway.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
I don't count the word "god" as sacred, so I don't think religions that use it
are worse than religions that don't. — Faré