[e-lang] Proposal: deprecate "rcvr" in favor of "ref"

[Mark S. Miller]

Dean Tribble wrote:
> Your examples of "What we'd ideally like to say," makes me want a 
> clarification:   For example, "possibly eventual" permits of manually 
> testing whether the reference is near, and then just using it as near.  
> Since I think that's generally a bad style, I was assuming that the 
> guard should represent the programmer declaration that the reference 
> should be only treated eventually ( i.e., with "send"), even if it's 
> not.  This would typically be used for references that might be remote, 
> but might be used within a vat e.g., for observers that should not be 
> invoked synchronously.  Which semantics does/should this guard specify?
> 
> The difference between "nocall"and "not necessarily near"


The guard we're trying to name specifies merely "not necessarily near". Since 
E only gives a runtime semantics to guards, there's no way to write a guard 
that imposes a static no-call constraint while preserving the dynamic value.

I continue to hope that we'll eventually have an E IDE with a lint-ish tool 
that does guard-advised type inferencing and alerts the programmer of likely 
problems. Such a static checking/advice tool could interpret the guard we're 
trying to name as imposing a static nocall constraint.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM