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On Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003, at 00:48 US/Eastern, Shiro Kawai wrote:
I'd still like to see a section or a note that refers to names
which conflicts or confusing with existing srfis and popular
implementations. It may be a job of users to look them out,
but having mentioned it in this srfi would be a great help
for users and implementators. Something like the following.
Compatibilities:
Some of the names defined in this srfi uses the same or
similar name in existing srfis or implementations. Some of
them are defined so that they are extension of the existing
practice, and some of them have incompatibilities.
Extensions to R5RS
R5RS doesn't specify the return value of string-set! and
vector-set!. This srfi specifies them to return the passed
collection.
string-ref, vector-ref and list-ref are extended to take
an optional argument, absence-thunk.
I just want to stress the fact that these are _extensions_ and not incompatibilities.
Relation to other SRFIs
string= has different interface from string= in srfi-13,
which has the following API:
(string= string1 string2 [start1 end1 start2 end2])
If the implementation wish to support both srfis, it can
dispatch by its argument types.
I think SRFI 13's STRING= is the problem here. It breaks the convention defined by SRFI 1, and SRFIs 43 and 44 use that same convention; SRFI 13's STRING= is really R5RS's STRING=?, but with the question mark removed for no reason I can find. (oops: having read your email over again, I realize that it was just a list of related work/extensions/incompatibilities; this comment is therefore irrelevant to this message, but it's still a comment I'd like to make somewhere)
string-copy and string-count are subset of srfi-13's.
*-COPY for sequences _used_ to be like SRFI 13's STRING-COPY and SRFI 43's VECTOR-COPY. I'm not sure where this changed, and I'll see if Scott will put that back in. The same applies to *-COUNT for sequences, except without it having been extended for sequences in prior versions of the document. In fact, it seems like it would make sense for a lot of the bag and general collection operations to be able to accept start and end arguments for the sequence versions, e.g. *->LIST, *-REMOVE-whatever, et cetera.
[...]
list= in this srfi takes two lists. list= in srfi-1 takes
arbitrary number of lists.
LIST= should be n-ary. I'm not sure why it isn't. (probably a typo; there are lots of those in the document, due to the tedium in writing it)
[...]
alist-copy is an extension of srfi-1's. SRFI-1's alist-copy
doesn't specify the behavior when the given argument contains
non-pair in the list. This srfi's alist-copy treats the first
element specially. [This actually suggests the choice of
'alist-' prefix may not be adequate, since the alist dictionary
given in srfi-44 is not really a plain alist. For example,
when people see alist?, they might think something like
(define (alist? obj) (and (proper-list? pbj) (every pair? obj)))
but it's not the case here. It's even obscure whether ordinary
alist operations such as assq, assv, assoc can be applicable to
this alist dictionary. Maybe 'alist-dict-' prefix would be
better].
A couple of problems with alists have been mentioned. Three solutions
came up on IRC:
- Create an abstract type for alists.
Advantages: removes the type conflicts that Tom mentioned
Disadvantages: _no_ list-processing routines work on abstract
and opaque alists, that definition of ALIST? still doesn't
work, and ASS{Q,V,OC} still don't work.
- Add a unique token to the head of the alist.
Advantages: removes the type conflicts
Disadvantages: that definition of ALIST? still doesn't work, and
ASS{Q,V,OC} still don't work.
- Add a metadata _association_ to the list, with a unique token
visible only to the implementation. This metadata could contain
the equivalence functions and even more, perhaps.
Advantages: removes the type conflicts, your ALIST? works, and
ASS{Q,V,OC} work.
Disadvantages: there probably are some that I just can't
remember now...Matthias brought this one up months ago, and I
didn't implement it; I probably had _some_ reason for not
implementing it.
srfi-1 uses "remove" and "delete" in a consistent way; the functions with "remove" takes a predicate, while the ones with "delete" takes a value to be compared to the element.In this srfi, "remove" and "delete" also have a consistent meaning,but different from srfi-1's. Consequently, there are a few procedures that have confusingly similar names with different signatures. [...]
I don't think these matter much. They aren't _incompatible_, anyways, though I suppose it might be worth mentioning.
Relation to existing implementations
Some implementations (e.g. PLT) use absence-thunk to give a
default value in ?-ref or ?-get API. Other implementations
(e.g. Chicken, STk, Gauche) instead allow an optional value
to specify a default value. This srfi takes the thunk approach
because .....
[Gauche has extended string-ref, vector-ref and list-ref.
Chicken and STk don't have them, but for example they have
hash-table-{ref|get} that takes an optional default value, which
would conflict if somebody wants to implement a hash table
as a dictionary.]
It's pretty easy to avoid this conflict by either not explicitly using SRFI 44 or explicitly using those implementations' libraries, or having a simple SRFI 44 wrapper around hash tables of those implementations when you do explicitly use SRFI 44.
[This has persional bias: Gauche has string-size that
returns number of bytes the multibyte string occupies]
--shiro