Re: memoization and conditional defines

[Bruce Korb]

Dirk Herrmann wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I would again like to put your focus on the question, whether we should
> support top level forms like the following:
> 
>   (if <condition> (define foo bar))
> 
> In the course of a former conversation on this list there was a consensus
> that such commands should be supported.  However, I have now a better
> understanding why allowing such a thing is problematic,
....
> As an introduction, I would give an example of how memoization works, at
> least in principle.

I don't care how memoization works.  I understand there are
optimization issues.  Optimizing isn't important to me, or
I would not use an interpretive language as my "extension
language".  If you add a disabling mechanism, then you'll
have the best of all worlds.  You can memoize/optimize to
your heart's content, and I'll disable it for my purposes.
If that is not practical and Guile becomes, essentially,
an semi-compiled language with constraints on where
defines may happen, then my goose will be cooked.

BTW, my guess is that memoizing Guile will make it go much slower.
Generally, I just pass Guile a few bytes to process (mostly less
than 40), handle the result and go on.  In fact, the most common
expressions are:  (set! foo (....)) and (. foo).  *Sometimes*, however,
I have some complex stuff that queries the environment to determine
what is going on and from that has to define various different
things.  It's that "sometimes" that hurts.