[slime-devel] Re: SWANK-BACKEND:FIND-DEFINITIONS -- return value specification.

[Helmut Eller]

* Tobias C. Rittweiler [2008-02-24 21:06+0100] writes:

> Helmut Eller <heller at common-lisp.net> writes:
>
>> Yes, that's a useful application.  I don't quite understand how
>> FIND-DEFINITIONS can be used here because FIND-DEFINITIONS expects a
>> (generalized) name as argument.  One possibility would be to use a
>> (yet-to-be-invented) function, say FUNCTION-NAME, which returns the name
>> of a function object and passing that name to FIND-DEFINITIONS.  But if
>> we invent a FUNCTION-NAME function, we could just as well invent
>> FUNCTION-SOURCE-LOCATION and CLASS-SOURCE-LOCATION, which would easier
>> to use than FIND-DEFINITIONS.
>
> I decided to do this way, because SWANK-BACKEND:FUNCTION-NAME does in
> fact already exist. And you can retrieve the name of structures and
> classes via TYPE-OF.

I guess that this will not fly for stuff like:

  (setf (fdefinition 'foo) (lambda () ...))
  (find-definition-for-thing #'foo)

>
>
>> If you want to stay with FIND-DEFINITIONS: instead of filtering out
>> results manually, it could be be easier to narrow the specification for
>> the argument instead of the return value.  E.g. and you could say that
>> for an argument like '(:function (setf foo)) the setf-expanders
>> shouldn't be returned.
>
> This is a possibility. Another possibility would be to specify the
> return value as outlined in my original posting, with the following
> addition:
>
>   FIND-DEFINITIONS returns a list of 
>
>     (DSPEC LOCATION &optionally impl-dependent-p)
>
>   If IMPL-DEPENDENT-P is non-NIL (it's supposed to be EQ to
>   :IMPLEMENTATION-DEPENDENT in this case, but not mandatorily so.), the
>   DSPEC is of implementation dependent nature, and can anything.
>
> How does this sound?
>
> (In the end, I don't care all /that/ much, but specifying the return
> value at least for a subset seems to be the more general solution to me,
> and validating by DESTRUCTURE-CASE is nice for documentation purposes,
> too.)

Sounds like you already made up your mind.

Helmut.