Procedures with Setters - Guile Reference Manual

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5.8.5 Procedures with Setters

A procedure with setter is a special kind of procedure which normally behaves like any accessor procedure, that is a procedure which accesses a data structure. The difference is that this kind of procedure has a so-called setter attached, which is a procedure for storing something into a data structure.

Procedures with setters are treated specially when the procedure appears in the special form set! (REFFIXME). How it works is best shown by example.

Suppose we have a procedure called foo-ref, which accepts two arguments, a value of type foo and an integer. The procedure returns the value stored at the given index in the foo object. Let f be a variable containing such a foo data structure.¹

     (foo-ref f 0)       => bar
     (foo-ref f 1)       => braz

Also suppose that a corresponding setter procedure called foo-set! does exist.

     (foo-set! f 0 'bla)
     (foo-ref f 0)       => bla

Now we could create a new procedure called foo, which is a procedure with setter, by calling make-procedure-with-setter with the accessor and setter procedures foo-ref and foo-set!. Let us call this new procedure foo.

     (define foo (make-procedure-with-setter foo-ref foo-set!))

foo can from now an be used to either read from the data structure stored in f, or to write into the structure.

     (set! (foo f 0) 'dum)
     (foo f 0)          => dum

— Scheme Procedure: make-procedure-with-setter procedure setter
— C Function: scm_make_procedure_with_setter (procedure, setter)

Create a new procedure which behaves like procedure, but with the associated setter setter.

— Scheme Procedure: procedure-with-setter? obj
— C Function: scm_procedure_with_setter_p (obj)

Return #t if obj is a procedure with an associated setter procedure.

— Scheme Procedure: procedure proc
— C Function: scm_procedure (proc)

Return the procedure of proc, which must be either a procedure with setter, or an operator struct.

— Scheme Procedure: setter proc

Return the setter of proc, which must be either a procedure with setter or an operator struct.

Footnotes

[1] Working definitions would be:

     (define foo-ref vector-ref)
     (define foo-set! vector-set!)
     (define f (make-vector 2 #f))