[Mono-list] Compiling egg-chicken libraries

[Fergus Henderson]

On 26-Feb-2004, Ben Maurer <05mauben@hawken.edu> wrote:
> Max is right here. Chicken/Egg is a design problem.

No, Max is wrong.  All other things being equal, designs that
do not involve mutual recursion are preferable to designs that do,
but mutual recursion is not in and of itself a design problem per se.

A design involving mutual recursion may well be the most elegant
design, provided that the underlying system supports mutual
recursion well.  If the two entities involved are genuinely
tightly coupled, then avoiding the mutual recursion may require
adding extra indirection in ways that make the program more
complicated, harder to reason about, and less efficient, without
any compensating benefit.

Languages and systems that do not support mutual recursion well suck!

Yes, that includes a lot of existing systems.

-- 
Fergus Henderson                    |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.