Re: Notations for calling Java methods

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

On 05/04/2018 11:34 AM, Duncan Mak wrote:
> I was doing some reading on the various Scheme implementations on the JVM
> and saw that both JScheme and SISC and of course Kawa have their own way to
> reference Java fields/methods.
> ...
> I was wondering if you could say more about the variously notations, and
> their pros and cons - is there a reason why Kawa did not adopt the Javadot
> notation?

It's been so long ...

I was never fond of javadot notation - it seemed a bit ad hoc - not to say ugly.
The "colon notation" was relatively late - there were various earlier notations,
including a variation of colon notation with special "magic" (ugly ...) characters:

     (*:method-name instance argument ...)

as opposed to the now-preferred form:

     (instance:method-name argument ...)

Looks like the "colon notation" as a separate section of the manual is from 2011,
but I believe the implementation is older than that: The class GetNamedPart (used
to represent colon notation) is from 2005.

> Also, I saw that Silk has another technique (
> http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~tim/Papers/Reflection99/Old/paper2.html), and
> what do you think about that?

I'm leary of Silk's (import CLASSNAME).  It defines imported methods as generic functions,
which seems a bit dangerous and prone to mysterious name clashes.

Note also that a key goal of Kawa is to support efficient compilation: you generally
don't want to use reflection. Instead Kawa tries to compile to bytecode similar
to what javac would emit.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/