early error detection

["William D. Gooch" <ai.gooch@MCC.COM>]

	Date: Fri, 17 Feb 89 08:59 CST
	From: ai.gooch@mcc.com (William D. Gooch)

	  If you want type-checking done early, you could use the :alterant
	option to defstruct to add type checks to your code.  

    Could you explain this?  I don't think :ALTERANT does what you think it
    does.  I don't know of any way to get defstruct accessors or setters to
    check that a structure is of the appropriate type.

You're right - I said that rather hastily based on a quick reading of
the documentation, and realized only afterward that I had misinterpreted
it.  My only excuse is that I favor flavors and rarely use defstruct -
sorry I tried to say more than I know.  But the point was that the
complaint had no basis given that the documentation states clearly 
that the :type option is for controlling the implementation of the 
data structure rather than for type checking. 

    What you can do is replace your defstructs with flavors.  Flavors can do
    everything that defstructs can do (you could pretty easily define a new
    defstruct macro that expanded into an appropriate defflavor), plus they
    perform automatic type checking of the structure argument.  By defining
    appropriate methods on the SETF operations you can also get checking of
    stores.  But this comes at a cost -- method invocation is slower than
    open-coded structure accessors.  TANSTAAFL.

Exactly right.

    I think the only sensible answer to this issue is to realize that no
    architecture currently does "full" error checking, but the Symbolics
    system does much more runtime error checking than is feasible on any
    conventional system.  It's not perfect, but what is?

						    barmar