This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 111 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 111 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
I don't see the use case for the lexical syntax. In fact, I'd classify it as a Bad Idea. - A non-mutable #&datum is functionally equivalent to datum, especially if auto-deboxing is supported. Why would you want this - and specifically why is this valuable enough for special lexical syntax? - A mutable #&datum is an anonymous initialized assignable global static. Global static variables are generally considered to be dangerous and to be avoided. Worse, if this is in the program text, you're mutating the actual program. You get into all kinds of nasty questions about separation of compile-time and run-time. Perhaps there is some use case for boxes as "holes" in data, written to and read from a file. But it still is hard to come up with a problem this solves - after all you still need some way to find the box you need to mutate. - Making it unspecified whether a box is mutable makes the feature non-portable and even more dubious. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/