Re: Turning Gnus groups into real objects

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On 07/21/19 09:40 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> (probably not), or b) adjust gnus-check-backend-function and
>> gnus-get-function to check if the server is a list or a struct and
>> dispatch to different kinds of functions.
>
> FWIW, cl-defmethod can also dispatch based on whether it's a struct or
> list, but I'm not sure so the "old-style" functionality could maybe be
> implemented as a kind of "compatibility backend of type `cons`"?

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we could "do
something" to the old style backends so that they're more definitely
identifiable as a Gnus server, and not just any old list?

It's possible to write new specializers for methods, right? If we could
use that to positively identify a old-style backend, I would love to
move the whole machinery into generic functions.