Re: Guile: What's wrong with this?

[Mike Gran]

> From: Mark H Weaver <address@hidden>
> No, `define' does not copy an object, it merely makes a new reference to
> an existing object.  This is also true in C for that matter, so this is
> behavior is quite mainstream.  For example, the following program dies
> with SIGSEGV on most modern systems, including GNU/Linux:
> 
>   int
>   main()
>   {
>     char *y = "hello";
>     y[0] = 'a';
>     return 0;
>   }

 
True, but the following also is quite mainstream
int main()
{
  char y[6] = "hello";
  y[0] = 'a';
  return 0;
}
 
C provides a way to create and initialize a mutable string.
 
> Scheme and Guile are the same as C in this respect.  Earlier versions of
> Guile didn't make a copy of the string in this case either, but it
> lacked the mechanism to detect this error, and allowed you to modify the
> string literal in the program text itself, which is a _very_ bad idea.

It all depends on your mental model.  Your saying that (define y "hello")
attaches "hello" to y, and since "hello" is a immutable, the string y
contains must be immutable.  This is an argument based on purity, not
utility.
 
If you follow that logic, then Guile is left without any shorthand
to create and initialize a mutable string other than
 
(define y (substring "hello" 0))
or 
(define y (string-copy "hello"))
 
Someone coming from any other language would be surpised to find that
the above is what you need to do to create an initialize a mutable string,
I think.
 
But 'define' just as easily can be considered a generic constructor
that is overloaded in a C++ sense, and when "hello" is a string, y is
assigned a copy-on-write version of the immutable string.
 
It was wrong to change this without deprecating it first.
 
Thanks,
 
Mike Gran