Re: Guile: What's wrong with this?

[Bruce Korb]

On 01/04/12 13:52, Ian Price wrote:
> > So my main question is:
> >
> >    Which is the higher priority, language purity or ease of use?
> That is a loaded question, as it presupposes ease of use is always the
> same thing as impurity e.g. ...

Absolutely not.  Making decisions is always about trade-offs,
otherwise it is not really a decision.  Should you give preference
to language aesthetics, or preference to ease of use *when*
there is a divergence?  More often than not, language purity
(consistency) *improves* ease of use.  Here we are looking at
something that does not appear to me to improve ease of use.
You have to go to some extra trouble to be certain that a string
value that you have assigned to an SCM is not read only.
That is not convenience.  If Guile were to implement copy on write,
then the user would not have to care whether a string were
shared read only or not.  It would be easier to use.  The only code
that would care at all would be the Guile internals.  (Where it
belongs -- my completely unhumble opinion :)