obsolete (?) stuff in boot-9

[Dirk Herrmann]

Hello everybody.

I have found a couple of definitions in boot-9.scm, which could probably
be removed (after deprecating them for a while).  I am not saying that the
definitions are not useful in principle, but I doubt they should be
included in boot-9.

The definitions that could probably be removed include:

* pk as an alias for peek.  One of them should be enough, IMO.
* -1+ as an alias for 1-.  I think everybody would use 1- anyway.
* return-it as an alias for noop.  Does anybody use this at all?
* and=>.  Not used, and the name is not obvious, so who would use it?
* string-character-length is just an alias for string-length.
* flags is obsolete since logior also handles 0 and 1 arguments.  Further,
  the name is unfortunate, since identifiers named flags are used all over
  guile.

Further, some of the bindings of the module system appear not to be used.
If we are going to replace the module system it could be helpful to first
get rid of stuff that is not used anyway, thereby reducing the complexity
when it comes to switching to the new system.

Not used:
  module-symbol-locally-interned?
  module-symbol-interned?
  module-symbol-binding
  set-module-obarray!
  set-module-binder!
  module-obarray-get-handle
  module-symbol-local-binding
  module-clear!

The whole module observer stuff seems to be unused:  There is no place in
guile where observers are added.  Thus, the following functions could
potentially be removed:
  module-observers
  set-module-observers!
  module-weak-observers
  module-observer-id
  set-module-observer-id!
  module-observe
  module-observe-weak
  module-unobserve
  module-modified

The functions make-root-module and make-scm-module could IMO be inlined
into the definitions of the-root-module and the-scm-module.  I don't think
they are of any further use.
  make-root-module
  make-scm-module


BTW:  This is all from a guile centered point of view.  Since I don't know
if people have used the above functions in their own code, I am not going
to remove anything above unless the maintainers explicitly tell me to.  In
any case, things would first be deprecated.  My suggestion for dealing
with deprecated stuff in boot-9.scm, btw, would be to put them separately
into a file boot-9-deprecated.scm.  This would allow people to check their
code agains a guile which holds no deprecated scheme level definitions.


Best regards,
Dirk Herrmann