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Re: SRFI 10

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 108 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 108 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



On 11/23/2012 11:34 PM, John Cowan wrote:
Therefore, I would consider subsuming SRFI 10 into SRFI 108 by desugaring
#,(foo a b "10" 32) as #&foo[&{'a 'b "10" 32}].  Note that symbols and
lists must be quoted as well as strings in order to force them to be
interpreted as datums.  Since this makes define-reader-ctor unnecessary,
and it is unscoped and has phasing problems, I would leave it out.

Two complications: For good and ill, SRFI 10 creates the object at
read time, which means it can be returned by the read procedure.

So one possibility is that *if* $quasi-value-transformer$:foo exists
in the read-type dynamic environment, is bound to the function,
*and* all the arguments are literal (i.e. self-evaluating objects,
or (quote xxx) forms), then $quasi-value-transformer$:foo is
invoked at read-time.

I'm nervous about this as the default. One problem is that the reader can't know (easily) if an overriding different mapping for $quasi-value-transformer$:foo
will be defined at expansion time, perhaps by importing a library.

A further complication (as mentioned by Shiro Kawai in a message with
the subject "Literals vs Quasi-literals") is you get some anomalies
if the created object is not self-evaluating.

So I think read-time expansion should only be done if explicitly requested.
One idea is a parameter object whose value is an association list, mapping
tags to expansion procedures.  Read checks this parameter if the tag is
bound - if so read calls the associated procedure.

Do that seem like a good solution?
--
	--Per Bothner
per@xxxxxxxxxxx   http://per.bothner.com/