Re: User-defined record types

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> A full bootstrap build still fails for me:
> cedet/ede.el:46:1:Error: Wrong type argument: sequencep,
> #%[cl-slot-descriptor expanded nil boolean ((:documentation . "State of an
> object being expanded in speedbar."))]

Looks like I missed a place where a copy-sequence needs to be turned
into a copy-record?  I know there's still this bug in cl-defstruct's
definition of the copy-<foo> function, but I think this is never used,
so it's probably somewhere else.

>> We're going to have trouble preserving backward compatibility with
>> pre-existing .elc files.  As you can see, the code says it inherits
>> from `cl-structure-object' (which now is of `record` type), but its
>> constructor `make-sm-test` creates a vector rather than a record, so
>> (cl-typep 'cl-structure-object) will fail if it only considers
>> `type-of'.
> What if we relax the type check to use (aref object 0) instead?

But we need an arrayp or recordp check before, so it'd be something like

   (and (or (arrayp x) (recordp x)) (aref x 0))

Problem is that now we're slower than we were before the introduction of
`record`.  One option could be to change `type-of' so as to know about
the old struct format, and to make this backward compatibility hack
dependent on a boolean var which defaults to nil but would be set to
t as soon as we detect the use of an old-style struct.

> That works for both old and new instances, as long as :initial-offset
> is 0.

:initial-offset is always 0 if :type is not `vector` or `list`, so we
don't have to worry about this issue.


        Stefan