Re: srfi-9 vs make-record-type

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 6:21 AM Christopher Lam <christopher.lck@gmail.com>
wrote

In experiments converting legacy code to use srfi-9 records, I'm finding
> the latter doesn't travel well across modules.
>

In SRFI 9 you need to define a record type in exactly one module and then
export whatever subset of the constructor, predicate, accessors, and
mutators (not typically the record type name) that you want to make
visible.  Other modules can then import those names.  This is because calls
on define-record-type are generative (SRFI 9 doesn't say so, but in
practice they are), so a particular record type should be defined only once.

In my code, I often export the predicate and accessors, but not the
constructor or mutators.  Then I export a factory method that may or may
not call the constructor.

It may be convenient to define the record-type in its own module.


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
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