> On Aug 3, 2020, at 11:48, Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> 
> Still, it would be nice to find out how to get this information more 
> directly instead of relying on functions that do much more than 
> what I was asking for.

In general, there aren’t any. The ability of struct->vector to extract a 
symbolic name for any value really is specific to struct->vector (and it’s only 
really useful for debugging, for the reason Ryan points out).

If you only care about bona fide structs, not primitive values like strings and 
ports, you can do a little better using struct-info:

    (define (type-name v)
      (match/values (struct-info v)
        [(#f _) #f]
        [((app struct-type-info name _ _ _ _ _ _ _) _) name]))

    (struct point (x y) #:transparent)
    (type-name (point 1 2)) ; => 'point

But this doesn’t work for non-transparent structs unless you own a sufficiently 
powerful inspector:

    (let ()
      (struct point (x y))
      (type-name (point 1 2))) ; => #f

    (let ()
      (struct point (x y)
        #:inspector (make-inspector))
      (type-name (point 1 2))) ; => 'point

But again, this just gets you a symbolic name, which is subject to the same 
issue Ryan points out. The value you get back from struct-info is truly unique 
to that particular type, so it’s a more useful value than the symbolic name. 
But again, it’s not clear to me why you’d want to do this (except for 
debugging/instrumentation), since you still can’t possibly do anything useful 
with a value of a truly unknown type.

On the other hand, if it *is* for debugging, then meddling with the inspector 
is a valid thing to do (and is in fact one of the main reasons inspectors 
exist). You can change current-inspector to a weaker inspector during the 
instantiation of the modules you want to debug, and then you can use 
struct-info to get information about any values of the struct types they create.

Alexis

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