Re: obsolete (?) stuff in boot-9

[Rob Browning]

I was looking at some old archives and I noticed Dirk did some work to
find some possible cruft in boot-9.  Some of the suggestions look
reasonable to me, but it didn't look like anyone responded.  I just
wanted to check to see if any of this really should go into one of the
RELEASE action lists.

Thanks

Dirk Herrmann <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello everybody.
> 
> I have found a couple of definitions in boot-9.scm, which could probably
> be removed (after deprecating them for a while).  I am not saying that the
> definitions are not useful in principle, but I doubt they should be
> included in boot-9.
> 
> The definitions that could probably be removed include:
> 
> * pk as an alias for peek.  One of them should be enough, IMO.
> * -1+ as an alias for 1-.  I think everybody would use 1- anyway.
> * return-it as an alias for noop.  Does anybody use this at all?
> * and=>.  Not used, and the name is not obvious, so who would use it?
> * string-character-length is just an alias for string-length.
> * flags is obsolete since logior also handles 0 and 1 arguments.  Further,
>   the name is unfortunate, since identifiers named flags are used all over
>   guile.
> 
> Further, some of the bindings of the module system appear not to be used.
> If we are going to replace the module system it could be helpful to first
> get rid of stuff that is not used anyway, thereby reducing the complexity
> when it comes to switching to the new system.
> 
> Not used:
>   module-symbol-locally-interned?
>   module-symbol-interned?
>   module-symbol-binding
>   set-module-obarray!
>   set-module-binder!
>   module-obarray-get-handle
>   module-symbol-local-binding
>   module-clear!
> 
> The whole module observer stuff seems to be unused:  There is no place in
> guile where observers are added.  Thus, the following functions could
> potentially be removed:
>   module-observers
>   set-module-observers!
>   module-weak-observers
>   module-observer-id
>   set-module-observer-id!
>   module-observe
>   module-observe-weak
>   module-unobserve
>   module-modified
> 
> The functions make-root-module and make-scm-module could IMO be inlined
> into the definitions of the-root-module and the-scm-module.  I don't think
> they are of any further use.
>   make-root-module
>   make-scm-module
> 
> 
> BTW:  This is all from a guile centered point of view.  Since I don't know
> if people have used the above functions in their own code, I am not going
> to remove anything above unless the maintainers explicitly tell me to.  In
> any case, things would first be deprecated.  My suggestion for dealing
> with deprecated stuff in boot-9.scm, btw, would be to put them separately
> into a file boot-9-deprecated.scm.  This would allow people to check their
> code agains a guile which holds no deprecated scheme level definitions.
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Dirk Herrmann
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930