Re: guile-1.5.1 and deprecated ...

[Thomas Wawrzinek]

Hi!

 > > I think perhaps we should move this over to devel since it seems like
 > > an issue we need to address before the stable release.  While the new
 > > behavior makes sense for normal procedures, it may not for methods.
 > 
 > This is not really a new behavior.  I think the module system /
 > generic function interaction always worked the same, but it might be
 > that the recent export/re-export cleanup prohibits some things to work
 > that did work (but mostly by accident).
 > 

That's true. It's the same behavior reported by Lars J. Aas last December:

http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/guile-user/2000-December/000480.html

 > One could also take the modularization a step further and put the
 > protocol into its own module:
 > 
 > [example snipped]

Yes, but this would require to know in advance which "protocols" you
need. This can become very inconvenient in a large application under
constant development.

If the OO system were message based, you would export the classes and have
access to all the methods. I understand that this more difficult to achieve
with the underlying implementation of generic methods and the module system.

However, since the methods are generic, and dispatch (sort of) over the
argument types, intuitively I would want the method definitions from *both*
modules, not just the one last imported, because usually they should
"augment" each other.

Maybe somebody should dig up the discussion mentioned briefly by Mikael
Djurfeldt in his response to Lars:

http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/guile-user/2000-December/000482.html

Regards,

                        Thomas