pathnames

[Harvey J. Stein]

Chris Bitmead uid writes:
 > Take the example of a document with several chapters. You've probably
 > got in mind some Lisp function which changes a "Chapter" object and
 > saves it to the disk. Something clever in the background makes sure
 > the old version is saved somehow.
 > 
 > I've got in mind a function (chapter-edit) which takes a "Chapter" as
 > argument and returns a new Chapter object as a result. The old version
 > is not changed in true functional style. Another function (book-edit)
 > takes a "Book" object as argument, and then calls (chapter-edit) to
 > modify chapters. Instead of modifying the book object, (book-edit)
 > makes a new book with the all the latest versions of the chapters and
 > returns the new book object. The old version of the book object is
 > left as-is. (In functional style)

Doing something like this would seem to me to be quite difficult,
bug-prone, and communication intensive.  Suppose I then have a
publications object which is a collection of book objects and article
objects, and the book objects are collections of chapters.  Now I call
(chapter-edit ch7), where ch7 happens to be from book3.  If
chapter-edit returns a new chapter object, then book3 is out of date,
and my publications object no longer contains all the latest
revisions.  Either I'd have to explicitly create a new book3
containing ch7, and explicitly create a new publications object
containing book3, or I'd have to implement all sorts of change
notification methods to trigger the apropriate actions in all the
container classes.

Unless one restricts completely to an object oriented subset of Common
Lisp, I'd believe that anything along the above lines would be
unworkable.  Either the user, the programmer or the system would have
to track down all references to the old ch7 and either leave them or
rewrite them to point to the new ch7.  This would include all lists of
book and or publications and or chapters that I happen to have kept
around anywhere at all.

-- 
Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
abel@netvision.net.il