[pro] "fhash"

[Daniel Weinreb]

Just for the record, I think extensible sequences would be really great!
-- Dan

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:06 AM, Daniel Weinreb <dlw at google.com> wrote:
> > Hi.   I read Christophe's paper on extensible sequences.  I don't think
> > this bears on my new package, though, for two reasons:
> > (1) it's only about sequences; maps don't fit into its framework.
>
> Yes, I was aware of that; I suggested the paper because it details
> what is, imho, an effort analogous to yours, and might give
> inspiration wrt. the general spirit, the API and the integration with
> the rest of CL.
>
> > (2) He is proposing here a change that would have to be made
> > to every Common Lisp implementation.
>
> Such a change would have to be made because CL already has a sequence
> abstraction, so it makes sense to extend it rather than to provide
> another abstraction with the same goals. Since there's no map
> abstraction in CL, a similar API for maps would not need any special
> support from implementations. Extra features like LOOP integration
> might be provided only on CL implementations with an extensible LOOP,
> or by using Iterate instead, or, shameless plug, doplus [1].
>
> > As may have been
> > apparent from other email I've sent, I am, sadly, pessimistic
> > that we can really get all of the implementors to make changes
> > in harmony.  It's not that they are bad or incompetent or
> > anything like that.  It's just that they're busy people with
> > other priorities.  In some cases, the priorities include
> > "putting food on the table" (in the metaphorical sense),
> > i.e. it would be easier if someone could pay them to
> > do this, but I don't see how that would happen.
> > Anyway, thanks for pointing me at this very interesting
> > paper.
>
> I'm with Pascal on pessimism: I'm sure all sane Lisp implementers will
> add any feature that is reasonably easy to implement and is demanded
> by sufficiently many users. Fixes to the MOP generally satisfy both
> these rules. Extensible sequences do not, yet, at least because most
> Lispers don't know about them or don't find them sufficiently useful
> to bug their vendors about them. In my personal experience with ABCL,
> where dealing with Java libraries is fairly common, having Java Lists
> be natively understood as CL sequences is valuable. I imagine that if,
> e.g., FSet would get more users, having it integrated with sequences
> would be appealing (even if it would open another can of worms since
> the CL sequence API assumes mutability - a design mistake, imho).
>
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/tapulli/wiki/doplus
>
> Alessio
>
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