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Re: To gh_ or not to gh_?


From: Marius Vollmer
Subject: Re: To gh_ or not to gh_?
Date: 12 May 2001 04:19:07 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.0.102

"Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:

> I come from the school where the thinking is that internal functions
> shouldn't be present in public (installed) header files at all.

I wouldn't want to have non-installed header files.  I agree that it
would be an improvement to distinguish between different levels of the
Guile API, in the sense that features that are more difficult to use
right are on lower levels and that users know which level a certain
feature belongs to.  But I, at least, don't want to shut them off from
the lower levels with technical measures that are difficult to
circumvent.

Abstractions are very good things, but there comes the time for every
abstraction to be broken.  It is very annoying when you can't do
something as cleanly as possible, even when you know exactly what you
want to do and how to do it, just because someone decided that you are
not to be trusted to know what to do.

We should care to not lead people to do dangerous or unadvisable
things out of ignorance.  But we shouldn't force them to use ugly
non-resilient kluges when they need to to something out of the
ordinary.  We shouldn't assume that people don't know how to hack
Guile right just because they are client programmers.



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