Re: Docstrings and Reference manual (Re: Discussing Guile and revising interfaces)

[Keisuke Nishida <kxn30 at po dot cwru dot edu>]

Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:

> > Hmm...  Isn't it possible to use some indexing scheme such as the one
> > used by Emacs?
> 
> This was probably stupid.  It looks like there won't be a problem to
> use names.  In that case names are better, because such a scheme is
> simpler and more robust, and speed is no problem here.

Right.  I suppose Emacs has the index in the executable binary file, right?
In that case, it is hard to modify the DOC file after compiling the binary.
Probably the name scheme is more flexible.  We can easily add additional
databases after installing the binary, for example.

> An even wilder possibility is to move toward a future Guile where
> every primitive is a generic function...

Is Guile going that way?  One question I have is how to express object
types.  I use symbols for now (i.e., primitive-procedure, etc.), but
I could use classes (i.e., <procedure> or <primitive-procedure> ?) if
they were activated by default.