Re: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> That's a terrible idea. It makes it much harder to reason about the
> correct operation of programs, since now it makes it virtually
> impossible to implement find-definition functionality without lots of
> type inference.

That's indeed the main problem, and I agree it's a serious one.

> There's also the runtime overhead of dynamic dispatch.

That's not relevant: one way or another there is dynamic dispatch,
regardless what system we use.

> Common Lisp solved this problem 20 years ago with namespaces. We should
> just implement CL namespaces instead of trying to shoehorn Smalltalk
> into the language. Would you accept a CL packages implementation?

Last time this was discussed (a year ago, maybe?), we neded turning it
down, mostly because `M-x grep RET' can't be used for find-definition
and find-uses.


        Stefan