On Aug 13, 2011, at 10:44 AM, John Clements wrote: > That is, the code for lazy racket contains the knowledge about which things > should be hidden by the stepper. I would argue, in fact, that this is the > *right* place for such knowledge. In particular, suppose you're developing > the lazy stepper, and you want to say, "this thing here is hidden." How do > you point to a particular expansion? You want to make an annotation in the > code for the expansion itself. The alternatives I can think of are all > hideously fragile, unless you go to some AOSD approach, but I think that this > would wind up being even more verbose, and not substantially less fragile. > > That is, I think that the "subtle problem" above is not actually a problem at > all.
Let me try to say what I understand out loud: 1. The existence of Stepper knowledge in the Lazy compiler creates a 'spiritual' dependency between the Lazy language and a tool in DrRacket (= Tool world). QUESTION: does this knowledge ever make sense outside of our tool suite? Could it be reused by a stack-tracing debuggger in a textual repl? 2. At the same time, this Tool knowledge is best injected into compilation just in case we want it. QUESTION: does some knowledge about Lazy compilation move into the Stepper if we don't inject the knowledge here? 3. I agree with John though I am actually hopeful that we can come up with a software architecture that eliminates the problem and isn't AOSD all the way. Is it possible to view this knowledge as a mixin that gets added to the Lazy compiler when the language lives in the Tool world? -- Matthias _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
