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2023-11-26.log
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<chitochi>can you elaborate on the ui use case (if you want to) ? i am not sure i understand, but it sounds interesting :o <jfred>chitochi: As an example, let's say you have a capability that lets you lock and unlock a smart lock. If you send that capability to someone else, it's helpful if the other person's UI is able to show them what they're able to do with it <jfred>vs. a capability without such associated metadata, which might accept "lock" and "unlock" methods but doesn't have a mechanism to tell you that <jfred>but as with the mechanism tonyg described it does indeed require a separate capability to expose that information (since the "describe" method is warded off and you need an incanter to interact with it) <jfred>that may be unavoidable in Spritely's case (cwebber says in that paper, "Miranda Methods don't work when methods are inessential") - though I suppose there's nothing preventing you from handing out that capability pretty freely <tonyg>Zarutian_iPad: thanks, the miranda methods are a useful guide here. <tonyg>chitochi: basically when someone over the network hands you a cap it's just a blob. How to figure out what it represents? How to display it? How to interact with it? There needs to be some way of asking it how it wants to be used <tonyg>chitochi: it's a common thing in OO systems stretching back forever <tonyg>jfred: neat, thanks, I'll check your post <tonyg>ok so, so far we see that in E there is no special capability required to ask a cap about which protocols it wants to deal with, while with cwebber's wards/incanters, there's a kind of "widely accepted" capability for each kind of reflection, opening the door to multiple possible kinds of alternative interface rather than just the one (as in miranda) <tonyg>as an aside, it'd be tremendously helpful if the guile-goblins docs could link to the source code backing, say, a function definition's docs <tonyg>the racket docs don't link to source code and it drives me up the wall <chitochi>that's really interesting thank you for all your answers!