Re: Fwd: Value of given type cannot be case to its own type.

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

On 2/10/21 8:38 AM, J. Vincent Toups via Kawa wrote:
> The issue was that I had defined a class called mecs in lib and there
> was also a library called mecs in lib. So there were two classes lying
> around called lib.mecs.
> 
> It makes sense in retrospect but I wonder if it might not also make
> sense to indicate in the class name of a library that it is produced
> by a define-library form rather than a class definition to prevent
> such classes in most cases.

This is covered in moderate detail here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Module-classes.html

It is convenient and flexible to compile both a library (lib mecs)
and a class mecs in package lib to the class lib.mecs.  Sometimes
(as you saw) there can be a clash, but I think the convenience
makes up for it.  Furthermore, changing it at this point might break things.

Kawa should catch this situation if both classes are produced by the same
invocation of the kawa command.  (If not, that is arguably a bug.)
However, if they're produced at different times, then it's harder to catch.

Also, if Kawa is confused by an existing incompatible lib.mecs class while it is
generating lib.mecs, that is also a bug.  I've run into some problems like that in the past,
and I've tried to fix them.  If you have a reproducible simple test-case I can take a look.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/