Re: difficulty of writing translators

[Bruce Stephens <b.stephens@isode.com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:

> I believe the current guile maintainer is opposed to adding variable
> tracing to Guile on the Scheme level. (IMO wrongly, because variable
> traces can be used to create a really nice magical interface for
> global configuration parameters. They'd look just like variables
> (you could directly access or set! them), but the app could react
> appropriately to changes in its parameters. I think traces are one
> of the best ideas in Tcl.)

I think their major use is in Tk, for arranging that widgets can
display the right text when it gets changed, and that kind of thing.

Having traces on *any* variables probably is a bad idea.  I don't see
a problem with having special magic variables which could have traces
on them, and the Tcl translation could use those exclusively (and
they'd be generally useful too, as you suggest).