Re: Opaque objects and Emacs documentation

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 23.07.2020 07:04, Richard Stallman wrote:
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>
>    > Its return value must be a "project
>    > instance" which satisfies a certain protocol defined by several
>    > cl-generic methods (think "interface" in Java, or "typeclass" in
>    > Haskell, or "protocol" in Clojure, or multimethods elsewhere).
>
> This protocol of operations and what jobs they are supposed to do
> is what defines he project instance data structure.  So that is
> a good way to document the data structure.
>
> However, I wonder if there are some data that we can expect every
> project instace to have..  For instance, does every project instace
> have a name?  Is there an operation to ask for its name?

The root directory is one such point of data. So the project-root method 
must be defined (it's an operation, part of the protocol).

Currently it serves the role of "project name" as well. We might add a 
new, separate method for it later, but it will be optional.

> What are the simple data items that every project instance should
> have?

So far this is it. The rest of the methods have default implementations.