Re: autos2j environment

Matthias Radestock <[email protected]> Sat, 17 Jun 2006 06:29:35 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.java.sisc.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Alessandro,

thanks for your comments.

"Alessandro Colomba" <[email protected]> writes:

> 1. Would the effect of install-autos2j be limited to the some lexical
> scope? It would be nice to be able to keep the chosen prefixes local
> to a module, for instance.

I considered that approach but can't think of an easy way to do
this. The closest I can get is something along the lines of

  (with-auto-s2j-env j% <body>)

which compiles and executes <body> in an environment that performs the
appropriate s2j lookups. The problem here is that this env is a
child of the toplevel and thus any bindings created by <body> are
created in that env rather than the toplevel.

> 2. Is there any way that something similar could be done with Java
> package names? As in:
>
> (import-java-package |java.lang| jl%)
>
> (let ((buf (java-new <jl%string-buffer>)))
>  ...

That is certainly possible though I doubt it's of much use in the
absence of lexical scoping.

One way to cut down on the verbosity of FQ class names is to introduce a
macro that lets you write s.t. like

  (define-java-classes-in-package (jl% j%java.lang)
     string-buffer
     system
     thread)

which simply expands to

  (define <jl%string-buffer> <j%java.lang.string-buffer>)
  (define <jl%system> <j%java.lang.system>)
  (define <jl%thread> <j%java.lang.thread>)


> 3. This is very minor, but what do you think of a name such as
> (import-autos2j) or the like, since we are, in a sense, importing a
> set of symbols from the outside?

The name 'import' has lexical connotations, and given that, as explained
above, this is not a lexical operation it would be inadvisable to call
it that.


Matthias.