[Gd-hackers] Possible typo in the Dylan Tutorial

[Andreas Bogk]

Hello,

it seems that mailman, our mailing list manager, is misbehaving, and
deleting mails that are held for moderator approval.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and work on a remedy for the
problem. Meanwhile, here's the mail by Dean Powell that was eaten by
mailman (twice, that is, *sigh*).

Dean, thanks for your interest in Dylan.  Your observations about the
tutorial being in error are correct, of course.  Skills in compiler
construction are not strictly required to help us out, there's enough to
do for libraries, documentation, portability etc.  Come join the IRC
channel once you have some time at your hand.

Andreas

------------------------------------
Dean Powell wrote:

I've been interested in Gwydion Dylan for quite some time, but was
unable to commit any time to actually doing anything with the compiler
until just recently.  In looking over the documentation, I seem to have
stumbled upon an important typo in the link to "Getting Started With
Dylan".  In the chapter on "Getters and Setters" (link
http://www.gwydiondylan.org/gdref/tutorial/ch04s03.html) the following
code snippet appears:

owner-setter(sample-vehicle, "Faisal");

I tried a similar piece of code in a test program, but received a syntax
error.  My piece of code needed to look like this:

 format-setter("Dean P", myCell);

before the compiler would accept the construct.  myCell is a class I've
created, similar to the sample-vehicle class derived in the tutorial.
'format' is a slot.  It seems calling the setter function for a slot is
backwards to what the tutorial tells me.  I actually have to put the
value first, and the slot second.  Am I correct in saying the tutorial
code is wrong?
I would be willing to help out with the project in any way I can.
Please note that I've never had anything to do with writing a compiler,
so I'd probably be more help creating documentation or something like
that.  I *have* programmed in C and assembler before, but it was as an
IBM mainframe systems programmer, and that was a while ago.

Because of hectic work load at my day job, I'm not really available
until mid to late June, but after that I'd be willing to expend at least
some spare time on your project.  Dylan looks quite interesting, and I'm
always willing to try out something new and unique.

You can reach me by return e-mail at dean.powell at telus.net.

Regards,
Dean Powell
Edmonton, Canada