Re: features inconsistency

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Victor Anyakin wrote:
> Greetings to All,
>
>   I would like to share my experience using Kawa interpreter.
>
>   Everything seems fine, but, it seems to me somewhat odd, how strings
>   are processed.  There are lots of cases, when strings returned from
>   java methods (of type <java.lang.String>) are not accepted by Kawa
>   routines (like string->number).  Each time I pass or receive a
>   string, extra care has to be taken, in order to ensure, that it will
>   be normally processed.

Yes, this is annoying, but it is to some extent unavoidable, since
java.lang.String objects are immutable, and Scheme strings can be
modified.

I do hope to more automatically convert between the two types, but
I haven't worked out the details.  Note automatically converting from
a Java string to a Scheme string is dangerous, because if someone
modifies the resulting string they may get non-obvious inconsistencies.
Adding a "non-modifioable Scheme string" type is probably the solution.
>   One more issue are plain java arrays.  I find it inconvenient to
>   define (primitive-array-get <type>) and so forth every time I wish
>   to process plain java array.

Yep.  The syntax is clunky.  You might want to define some type-specific
macros for your application.

I have been thinking about an alternative syntax.  I'm leaning towards
using function-call syntax, but that is a rather radical change:

(define my-arr (<int[]> length: 10))
(set! (my-arr 3) (my-arr 5))
--
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/