Re: Should we be touching goops?

[David Kastrup]

Dan Eble <dan@lyric.works> writes:

> On Jun 5, 2022, at 08:36, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> While I agree with Dan that at the current point of time Moment is
>> definitely overloaded too much (this has historical reasons since it had
>> been the _only_ Scheme-accessible version of the Rational type, with
>> Rational being required before Guile gained its own implementation of
>> rational numbers), we disagree about where to draw the lines and how
>> many of them.
>
> I don't like to tell people who enjoy coding in Scheme how it should
> be done.  If you want to use a single type for points in the musical
> timeline and for distances between points, that is fine.  Calling that
> type "moment" is problematic.

I can second that.  The name is not particularly fabulous for all of the
semantics coming with the type.  It's more like CommonTime or something.
At the same time, it is the kind of historical baggage where at least I
am rather doubtful of the value of changing it.  We get so many posts
where the reply is "have you run convert-ly?" for much less invasive
changes that I doubt this is worth the trouble: it would invalidate most
of the LSR, for example, unless we retain lots of backward-compatibility
functions in which case the adoption will be chaotic and the backlash
only delayed.

-- 
David Kastrup