6.25.4.2 Trap Interface

The capabilities provided by hooks are great, but hooks alone rarely correspond to what users want to do.

For example, if a user wants to break when and if control reaches a certain source location, how do you do it? If you install a “next” hook, you get unacceptable overhead for the execution of the entire program. It would be possible to install an “apply” hook, then if the procedure encompasses those source locations, install a “next” hook, but already you’re talking about one concept that might be implemented by a varying number of lower-level concepts.

It’s best to be clear about things and define one abstraction for all such conditions: the trap.

Considering the myriad capabilities offered by the hooks though, there is only a minimum of functionality shared by all traps. Guile’s current take is to reduce this to the absolute minimum, and have the only standard interface of a trap be “turn yourself on” or “turn yourself off”.

This interface sounds a bit strange, but it is useful to procedurally compose higher-level traps from lower-level building blocks. For example, Guile defines a trap that calls one handler when control enters a procedure, and another when control leaves the procedure. Given that trap, one can define a trap that adds to the next-hook only when within a given procedure. Building further, one can define a trap that fires when control reaches particular instructions within a procedure.

Or of course you can stop at any of these intermediate levels. For example, one might only be interested in calls to a given procedure. But the point is that a simple enable/disable interface is all the commonality that exists between the various kinds of traps, and furthermore that such an interface serves to allow “higher-level” traps to be composed from more primitive ones.

Specifically, a trap, in Guile, is a procedure. When a trap is created, by convention the trap is enabled; therefore, the procedure that is the trap will, when called, disable the trap, and return a procedure that will enable the trap, and so on.

Trap procedures take one optional argument: the current frame. (A trap may want to add to different sets of hooks depending on the frame that is current at enable-time.)

If this all sounds very complicated, it’s because it is. Some of it is essential, but probably most of it is not. The advantage of using this minimal interface is that composability is more lexically apparent than when, for example, using a stateful interface based on GOOPS. But perhaps this reflects the cognitive limitations of the programmer who made the current interface more than anything else.

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