Re: emacs and guile (Re: ehelp woes, or why I hate a module that I love so much)

[Richard Stallman]

    Actually, the issue is the symbol's value(s).  Scheme symbols don't
    have separate function and value slots.  Emacs Lisp symbols have a few
    other fields associated with them, like indirect_variable, that also
    don't fit the basic Scheme model.  And if we separate the name from
    the values, there's the question of what exactly a symbol is.

    There are several ways to deal with this.

    Some involve changing Guile's symbol representation to have the extra
    fields.

If that gives good and clean results, we should use that method, for
efficiency's sake.

      IMNSHO this is tantamount to declaring Scheme not to be up to
    the task of implementing Lisp, and I'm not prepared to believe that.

Our goal is to support Scheme, but this doesn't mean we have to be
purists about how we do it.  We can bring Guile "up to the task" by
adding a facility to add extra slots to a symbol, for
application-specific purposes.  Rather than a kludge for Emacs, this
will be a general Guile feature with wider usefulness.