This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 57 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 57 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Felix Winkelmann wrote: >campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: >> >> I am also *vehemently* opposed to the completely unrestricted operator >> of reflection RECORD->SEXP. Reflection should either be completely >> expurgated -- as I'd prefer --, or, if you intend to include any at all >> in this SRFI, highly controlled by whomever defined the record type. > >I think `record->sexp' is actually pretty handy (for example for debugging purposes). >I vehemently suggest to leave it in. I agree totally; Ideas of "encapsulation" meaning you can't get at stuff are silly in the first place unless you start by assuming the programmer is stupid. And this is a Lisp. Let's not assume that a Lisp programmer is too stupid to know when not to use reflection. I'd prefer the reflection operator to be RECORD->LIST or RECORD->VECTOR though. The aggregation of things returned is probably not going to make a coherent program expression; it should be expressed as data instead, and the name of the operator should reflect that. Bear