[racket] Advice on a macro for mutating structs

On 2011-07-28, at 12:43 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> 7 minutes ago, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>> 
>> On Jul 28, 2011, at 2:10 PM, Tom McNulty wrote:
>> 
>>> I was hoping that I could locate the getter (and setter) with just
>>> the field and structure type but that information doesn't seem to
>>> be possible.
> 
> Ah, you're right.
> 
> 
>> I don't understand your request but if you are giving me the
>> structure name and the structure field, you can write a
>> context-sensitive macro:

Matthias: Sorry I worded that poorly.  I was looking to retrieve the accessors and mutators from the structure and field names in the macro, but that information is not retained.  

> 
> That's how Tom started, and I didn't follow the intention of using the
> field name and suggested using the struct info.
> 
> But the real thing that you (Tom) are fighting with is trying to use
> field names, where the struct info is disregarding that and keeps
> around just the getter and setter names. 

Other than possibly better error messages, I'm not sure then that the struct-info approach provides much (any?) benefit; for it still relies on knowing the accessor name.  It also seems that accessors/mutators that do not follow the usual [set-]struct-field naming seem to be a rarity (certainly in my code).

>  Looks to me like a better
> approach would be to use the getter names instead -- possibly with a
> macro that makes more convenient getters?

I thought about this approaching, using something similar to the key-word structures here, http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2010-December/043340.html
but decided it'd be better to make something that works with vanilla structs.  


Thanks, 

- Tom.

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