Programmer-defined data types, version 2

["Morris J. Katz" <katz@polya.stanford.edu>]

In-Reply-To: Pavel.pa@xerox.com's message of Tue, 29 Aug 89 18:29:19 PDT <890829-184715-4408@Xerox>


For aesthetic reasons I would prefer to see
    (MAKE-RECORD-TYPE type-name . field-names)
rather than
    (MAKE-RECORD-TYPE type-name field-names)
as the for for MAKE-RECORD-TYPE.

To me
    (make-record-type car 'num-doors 'engine-size)
is a lot more elegant than
    (make-record-type car '(num-doors engine-size)).

How do others feel?

The only problem I see with my proposed modification is that it is not
clear what to do about RECORD-CONSTRUCTOR.  If it were redefined as 
    (RECORD-CONSTRUCTOR rtd . field-names)
then 
    (record-constructor car)
would almost have to return a constructor for which no values are
going to be specified (for consistency sake).   How then would we say
that all the fields are to be specified?
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Morry Katz
katz@polya.stanford.edu
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