On 07/16/2012 12:39 PM, Harry Spier wrote:
I should have been a little clearer with my question. I understand
that its not a good idea to expose the setters and getters of a struct
unnecessarily. What I meant was:
(provide struct-id) exposes the struct constructor
(provide (struct-out struct-id)) exposes the constructor and the field
getters and setters
I'm not clear the use of the first form. I.e. of what use is having
access to the constructor without access to the field getters and
setters. So thats why I asked if there are any cases where (provide
struct-id) would be of use. If the answer is no, then why not just
have (provide struct-id) expose the constructor and the field getters
and setters.
(provide id) always just provides 'id'. We've chosen to use other
subforms, like struct-out, for other behavior. Making struct-name
identifiers work specially in provide forms would be more complicated
and (IMO) less readable.
Ryan
Another question about provide provide-specs, since almost all
provide-specs allow multiple provide-specs as arguments where would
the form (provide (combine-all x x x x)) be useful.
Thanks,
Harry Spier
About question 2, in general you don't want to expose the details of
your structures. For example, when defining a queue like:
(struct queue ([front #:mutable] [rear #:mutable]))
you don't want users to set/get the fields directly; instead you
probably want them to use the `enqueue'/`dequeue' functions, which
maintain the abstraction invariants, assuring the queue is consistent
no matter what the users do. In general, I believe it is better not to
provide the setters (unless it really makes sense, of course).
PS: Sorry for the duplicate Harry, I forgot to put
users@racket-lang.org in CC in my original response.
2012/7/15 Harry Spier<vasishtha.sp...@gmail.com>:
1) In section 8 of the Racket reference there is this example:
-------------------------------------------
Examples:
(define-struct tree (val left right))
(match (make-tree 0 (make-tree 1 #f #f) #f)
[(tree a (tree b _ _) _) (list a b)])
'(0 1)
----------------------------------
but I wasn't able to find any reference in the documentation to a
constructor form make-struct-id . I'm assuming that in the above example
(match (make-tree 0 (make-tree 1 #f #f) #f)
is equivalent to
(match (tree 0 (tree 1 #f #f) #f)
Is that correct? Is make-struct-id a deprecated form of the constructor
procedure struct-id?
2) In a module which contains a structure, lets call it "structure-a" I can
have the statement:
(provide (struct-out structure-a))
which provides the constructor procedure and the getters and setters to
structure-a
but I can also have the statement
(provide structure-a)
which only provides the constructor function.
Are there any cases where you would want to have (provide structure-a)
rather than (provide (struct-out structure-a)) ?
Thanks,
Harry Spier
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