Re: Various comments John Cowan 24 Jun 2006 17:12 UTC

Per Bothner scripsit:

> Now I'm not sure how identifier-macros really help, except perhaps
> *internally* in the class implementation, which is less important.

Just so.

> But my point is that there are good software-engineering reasons why
> you might want to have a function-call hide behind what looks like
> a variable access.

I don't see how this applies to Scheme, where the difference between
variable access and function call is only two characters, as opposed
to the conventional Java "obj.foo" vs. "obj.getFoo()".

I'd rather say that in Scheme everything should look like a procedure
call, and compilers ought to inline procedure calls of this trivial
kind, what in Smalltalk are called "short-circuit sends".

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