RE: message primitive

["Daschbach, John L" <John dot Daschbach at pnl dot gov>]

	"Brad Knotwell" <knotwell@my-Deja.com> writes:

	<snip>
	>  > If it's too heavyweight, then one might be able to strip away
	>  > some of the features, provide a simple format in libguile and
	>  > make a more general version of `format' available in a
	>  > library?
	> 

	> Intentionally provocative question.  Given that a perfectly good
	> Scheme format module exists, why bother to provide similar
	> functionality from the C world?  Even if the current format module is
	> too large (not perfectly good?), why not provide a stripped down
	> format module written in scheme?

	Because we need to be able to use it from the C level (for error
	handling).  I find it a bit ugly to use Scheme code from within the
	core.

	Greg

I'd just like to weigh in on the side of the 'simple-format' or whatever you
wish to call it.  In my ideal world a CL like format written in C would be small
enough to include in the core.  I have found that, at least for big numerical
I/O, format.scm is slow enough it often has to be eliminated.  Thus I have just
recently written a guile wrapped C function to handle certain output needs.
This takes effort and time, and is a direct result of the fact that fast
formatted output is not available in guile.   I understand that it is not good
to move guile in the kitchen sink direction, at the core level.  However, in
many applications outside those found in the accademically oriented scheme texts
I/O performance is vital.  Much of Perl's importance can be tied to it's easily
mastered, powerful and fast I/O system.

The best naming scheme might be 'guile-format', which would be extensible to
other areas where guile choses to enhance the RnRS standards.  These extensions
could be part of the 'guile' module and could be in a separate library from the
core, like readline. 

Since python seems to be suceeding very well where guile thought it would be
important it might be useful to observe how the python community is structuring
their language and libraries.  I don't know python and I dislike the idea of
indentation being so syntactically important, but there is a lot of scientific
work moving to python and at some point switching to phython may be unavoidable.


-John