NIMP thing

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

While I of course share your goals concerning Guile and Guile code
(and prefer coding over discussing), we obviously completely disagree
regarding the approach of your change.  [It is this approach which I
call "careless".  Made by a less careful programmer it would have led
to a larger mess.]

It's not that I'm complaining about it.  I think it's plain wrong and
should be taken out.  (This is the first main message of this letter.)

The purpose of my "alarm signal" and the following discussion was to
get you to revert the NIMP changes and do it in a safer and more
controlled way.  Yes, that would have taken valuable time, but we are
now dealing with very high values: Guile efficiency and Guile
stability.

I also believe that it is possible to make Guile more available to
hacking, and think it's a good intention to lower the threshold for
hacking.  But I believe strongly that one should use different
approach to hacking some particular feature of Guile and hacking the
infrastructure of an interpreter which has been stable for years.  I
believe there exists such safer approaches (Marius gave a concrete
suggestion) that would perhaps take longer time to implement, but
which would lead to the same good goals and which wouldn't endanger
efficiency and stability.

However, I've now concluded that you won't revert your changes, and,
given that I have allegedly quit as Guile developer, and given both of
our time constraints, I can't force you to do it.  So, I'll now quit
pushing for it.  (This is the second main message.)

Just, finally, I'm _not_ trying to attack you.  I'm attacking your
approach.  I even think your approach can be good, but not for the
_infrastructure_ of Guile.  I appreciate you, but not the particular
approach in this particular case (= NIMP thing).

But, given your skill as programmer and your general intelligence,
let's hope that you are right in your beliefs about Guile code and
compiler optimizer abilities, and that there hasn't been many serious
bugs introduced.  (I'm actually prepared to expect that this
(sunshine) is the case.)

And, I promise to start the same kind of discussion next time you
touch the infrastructure with the same methodology.
(Do I need to say that this was the third one?  ;-)

/mdj