Re: Emacs Lisp and Guile

[Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer@uni-dortmund.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> But I think that running arbitrary code is not good
> design--variables should be variables, not act like functions.

But they could be used as the basis for all kind of funny
variable-like behavior.  I don't think we want to support all
possibilities directly in the Guile core.  Having variables that act
like functions is enough and we can build the rest on top of them,
without having to change the core.  The latter is important since
people might want to replace the execution engine of Guile (with a
compiler to machine code, say).

The TCL notification example was meant to show that there are also
other behaviors of variables that could be implemented on top of
variables-that-act-like-functions.  We could do that without having to
add an explicit notification feature to the Guile core.

Variables-that-act-like-functions can also be abused for things that
are better done by real functions, but I think it is wrong to not
offer powerful features only because they can be abused.

> Can you look for some way to implement forwarding facilities in
> Guile?

Ok.