This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 105 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 105 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Regarding square brackets.... John Cowan: > R6RS imposes this requirement, but R7RS does not. True, but since treating [] as a synonym for () *IS* in R6RS, a large number of Scheme implementations (20!!) implement [] as synonyms for (). And since R6RS imposes it, I believe there's a fair amount of code that uses it. I think that many implementations will continue to support [] as a synonym for (), in part because of the amount of code that uses it. > You can't just say "Brackets mean what > they mean in Scheme", because there is and will be no unified meaning. By intent, the current draft SRFI-105 spec simply doesn't define unprefixed brackets at all. Different Scheme implementations do different things, as you've already noted. Other Lisps do other things too, for example, Arc has a completely different meaning for [...]. So I believe the spec should *not* impose any particular meaning on unprefixed [...]; there are too many cases where established code requires a particular (but varying) meaning. If someone wants that to have a specific meaning for unprefixed [], I think that should be part of a different spec. I don't think we need to require any particular definition of [...] to meet our goals. Even more importantly, I think trying to force one meaning would greatly *decrease* adoption. > Since you're providing a full implementation modulo the change to > the readtable, you need to make some decision for the purposes of that > implementation, and it's not clear to me what it should be. The demo implementation implements [] as a synonym for (); see the code for underlying-read. I think this is far more widely used meaning, and it makes sense as a demo. But it's not a requirement of the spec; it's just a fact about the demo. (The demo implements basically an R5RS reader plus a few R6RS extras and other extensions, in an effort to make it "useful enough" as a demo.) The intent is that people would modify their readers to implement SRFI-105, at which point, [...] will do whatever their reader already does. --- David A. Wheeler