[cells-devel] Cells Has Been Validated

[Ken Tilton]

On 6/23/06, Thomas F. Burdick <tfb at ocf.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> On 6/23/06, Ken Tilton <kentilton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh, yeah. I finally fixed defclass. There is now an abbreviated
> defmodel,
> > DEFMD:
> >
> > (defmd defmd-test (md-test-super)
> >     (aaa :cell nil :initform nil :initarg :aaa :accessor aaa) ;; defmd
> would
> > have written the same on just "aaa"
>
> FIXED?!?!
>
> Aren't a lot of problems with Cells traceable to using :cell nil,


Wouldn't know; never use it. :)

Well, I found a few. The keyboard accelerator for a widget. God help the
user if those start changing according to program state. Also a cache of the
window at the top of the gui hierarchy. It's a pretty quick trip up the tree
to do that functionally, but why not save the result? Make it a cell and it
has to be an input, dependencies pop up all over.

because either someone thought "okay this one is an exception" or as
> an efficiency hack?  Certainly accidentally non-Cell slots have caused
> me no end of grief when I run into them.


Amazing. I never had a problem.  What happens  is that I finally try to
apply a cell to one and the internals say, "what are you doing? I see a cell
initializer for a non-cell slot." (Not sure that safeguard is still in there
tho.)

To the extent my bet was correct ("who would ever want to use a cell for
/this/?!") the risk of accidentally trying to use a cell goes down
commensurately.

I've gotten to the point of viewing :cell nil as a hack that's
> occasionally necessary when either (a) I'm not able to fit some
> behavior into the Cells model, or (b) the Cells model turns out to
> have a shortcomming that needs to be fixed, but in the meantime we
> have a work-around.  Given that, I'm not supporting :cell nil at all
> in C4 (and C4-other-lisps);


Question: do you even /look/ at Cells code any more?

Phillip Eby over on PyCells is now fleshing out his dataflow package, and we
unearthed another Pythonista who had some DF code but got motivated by Cells
to formalize it into a proper package.

My other question: what do we call the annual conference, and where do we
hold it? Dataflow 2007? Gotta get the KR and COSI people, too. I propose not
having any talks, so there is more time for drinking. Maybe we could label
the clusters of drinkers as to the dataflow topic they happen to be on. Need
some electronic signage....

kt
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