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Re: datum comments of sweet-expressions

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 110 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 110 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



On 7/11/13, David A. Wheeler <dwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 29 May 2013 02:31:25 -0400, Mark H Weaver posted a long set of comments.
> One recommendation was to supporting datum comments of sweet-expressions
> (#; + whitespace).  The idea makes sense, and I did anticipate this.
> However, the obvious ways imply some additional trickiness in grammar
> and implementation.  Here's how I'm thinking about tackling this, but
> if anyone has a better idea, *please* speak up!!
>
>
> The current SRFI-110 says:
> "Scheme’s datum comments (#;datum) comment out the next neoteric
> expression, not the next sweet expression (and please don’t follow the
> semicolon with whitespace)."
>
> Mark H Weaver recommends:
> "I often put "#;" on the preceeding line, which you're now asking me
> not to do. What is the purpose of this request? Also, "#;" becomes
> much less useful if it cannot comment out an entire sweet expression.
> Perhaps "#;" should have a similar rule as the traditional
> abbreviations: if it is followed by whitespace, then the following
> /sweet expression/ is ignored, otherwise the following /neoteric
> expression/ is ignored. What do you think?"
>
> I have *definitely* thought about this.  Indeed, I wrote the text
> "don't follow the semicolon with whitespace" so that supporting
> datum comments of sweet-expressions could be added as a future addition.
>
> But if we add this as a *requirement*
> to SRFI-110, then the grammar rules and sample implementation
> have to be modified to handle it.  For example:
> a b
>   c
>   #; e
>      f
>   g
> => (a b c g)
>
>
> THE CHALLENGE: Properly supporting this requires properly supporting
> datum comments of a sweet-expression if it is the *last* item, e.g.:
> fee fie
>   foe
>   fum
>   #; blood
>     Englishman
> => (fee fie foe fum)
>
> Handling *last* items turns out to be trickier to do, and I think
> that trickiness has nothing to do with whether or not the grammar is LL(1).
> Currently there isn't a good way to handle lines that produce no value.
> In particular, the "it_expr" rule *must* return a datum.
> In the case of lines that begin with "#!sweet", the grammar rules
> recurse so they can have something to return.  This recursion
> is why the GROUP_SPLIT rule is so complicated.  That approach
> won't work here, because the datum comment might be the last group
> at that indent level.
>
> So for the moment, let's say that we'll try to fix up the existing
> LL(1) rules instead of rewriting the grammar rules in a completely
> different notation.  Even if we do that, I want to do that as a separate
> stage, and I think we should explore simplification further first.
> So...  how could we do this?
>
> One approach would be to fiddle with all the grammar rules that
> invoke it_expr.  However, I think that would be really ugly and involve
> a lot of repetition in the rules.  The problem is that the calling
> rules each have to handle identification of the situation AND
> invoke a different action rule for that case.  Ugh.
>
> I think a better approach would be to modify the
> key production "it_expr" so that it can return an "EMPTY" value,
> distinct from a valid datum like (), that indicates
> "no value at all".  This would require some the action rules
> to handle "EMPTY" values.  I think that could be handled by
> a few tweaked procedures, e.g., some "cons" can be replaced with "econs"
> (aka "empty-handling cons"):
> (define (econs x y)
>   (cond
>     ((eq? y EMPTY) x)
>     ((eq? x EMPTY) y)
>     (#t (cons x y))))
>
> If we do this, one side-effect is that the GROUP_SPLIT rules could
> probably become much simpler.  We'd no longer need to recurse deeply,
> because there'd be a way to signal that we saw an empty result.
>
> Thoughts?  Comments?  Is there a better way I'm not seeing?

Haha more nasty tagging values hahahaha!  We never seem to get rid of them!

; unique tagging value
(define EMPTY (cons '() '()))

Basically, our previous (before SRFI-110) implementations made use of
lots of these objects.  There's even a dangling "special tag to denote
comment return from hash-processing" which no longer comments anything
at all, the special tag having been removed.

This is problematic for Scheme implementations that support some kind
of extension for dispatching on "#".  Although I guess that's the
problem of the implementation.  Such # extensions are cute but make
life hard for us indentation-formatting guys.

That said our old implementations of sweet-expressions used such
unique nasty tagging values, so I don't see why we can't use them
again if it greatly simplifies our code.


Sincerely,
AmkG