Scattering

• Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 01:46:39 PST
• From:
  Michael Brundage <anomaly@u.washington.edu>
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I really love the new scattering and try/except/endtry constructs.  It's fun
to re-implement icky Lambda routines with these new friends.

However, I do have a suggestion/wish:  It would be nice, in the scattering
assignment, to be able to require the targets to evaluate to a certain type.
This would further reduce the code necessary to evaluate arguments.
For example, if you implemented $object_utils:has_verb as

@program foo:has_verb tnt rxd
"Usage: has_verb(object, verb)";
"Return whether object has a definition of verb anywhere in the hierarchy";
{target, vname} = args;
try
  verb_info(target, vname);
  return {target};
except(E_VERBNF)
  return this:has_verb(parent(target), vname);
except(ANY)
  return 0;
endtry
.

Then you might like also to make sure that typeof(target)==OBJ and
typeof(vname)==STR, but this currently requires an if statement.  How about
including this somehow in the scattering assignment?  Perhaps something like

{OBJ target, STR vname} = args;

??  Then after checking whether E_ARGS should be raised, it could check
whether any assignments resulted in a type mismatch, and return E_INVARG
if necessary...


michael

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