The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Failed to get the memo

So I'm still working with Lisp Scheme guile, and I'm still questioning if Lisp Scheme guile is a HLL or a HHL-wannabe.

I'm at a point where using a structure would be the best thing to use. A structure is nothing more than a collection of data (possibly of different types) that can be treated as a unit. In C, a typical structure definition would be (example from my own code):

/* data associated with a web-request */

struct http
{
  URLHTTP url;
  List    headers;
  Stream  io[2];
  int     version;
  int     status;
};

Pretty straight forward.

I check the the documentation and yes, it supports structures.

Cool!

So, here's how you define a “simple” structure with only two elements:

(define ball-root (make-vtable-vtable "pr" 0))
          
(define (make-ball-type ball-color)
  (make-struct ball-root 0
	       (make-struct-layout "pw")
               (lambda (ball port)
	         (format port "#<a ~A ball owned by ~A>"
                         (color ball)
                         (owner ball)))
               ball-color))
        (color ball) (struct-ref (struct-vtable ball) vtable-offset-user))
        (owner ball) (struct-ref ball 0))

What? Did Lisp Scheme guile take lessons from Forth? I have to manually construct the structures? This is a HLL? And not only do I have to write code to create structures, but I also have to write code to populate them. Anyone remember BASIC?

10 DIM A(20):FOR I=1 TO 20:READ A(I):NEXT I
20 DATA 3,4,23,88,2,3,4,9,10,12,44,87,8,7,6,13,33,8,29,0

(Which, incidentally, is another pet-peeve of scripting languages—the inability to have pre-initialized data at run time.)

I suppose I could always write code to make structures easier, but why should I have to abstraction to what is arguably the highest level programming language in existance? (although structures might be easier to use in Common Lisp, I don't have a Common Lisp environment to test it) Have structures fallen out of vogue in HLLs? Did I fail to get the memo?

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