[racket-dev] syntax-property guards? (was: Re: The Stepper strikes again)

12 hours ago, John Clements wrote:
> 
> What Eli is proposing, AFAICT, is not in fact a new abstraction, but
> a more disciplined--I might say, way *too* disciplined--use of the
> ones we have.

Let me put it in concrete terms: I'm the author of
racket/private/promise -- there's now a piece of code there that I
don't understand.  So if there's a bug there, my options are to ignore
it and pass it onto Stephen (bad, since it's my code and he might not
be aware of all the details), fix it myself (bad, because I don't have
a clear idea what the code is supposed to do, and will likely break
it), or start a discussion (with Stephen and/or you) about how the
code needs to change -- which is the best option, but the worst in
terms of getting the bug resolved.  Even worse, what happens if you
both move away[*] -- then I my options are to look at the source
myself, or break the stepper.  Or if all three of us are moving away,
then someone needs to learn parts from two non-trivial systems to fix
the bugs.

It shouldn't be surprising now that I disagree with the "*too*".


([*] Even if this is unlikely, I'm thinking about this from a
maintenance point of view, where such questions are very obvious.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!