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On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, Ken Dickey wrote:
> On Saturday 20 March 2004 04:06 am, Andre van Tonder wrote:
> > Taylor Campbell wrote:
> > > - SYNTAX-DO -- I don't like this at all. It's not very descriptive
> > > and it clashes with the DO syntax in regular Scheme. While it may
> > > be a good point that it does nothing more than 'do' a computation,
> > > and this is also what Haskell uses, it still isn't descriptive to
> > > just say 'do,' and it still has the clash.
> >
> > Understood. I haven't been able to come up with a better name, though.
>
> I would suggest SYNTAX-BIND, since binding is what it does, and picking a new
> name for the current (internal) syntax-bind.
At first glance, binding is indeed what it does, but there are two
possible problems that I can see.
First, in the monadic prior art, *bind* is already used for something more
akin to the current internal *syntax-bind*, so using bind for do could
cause confusion.
Second, in e.g. Haskell, with *do* one can actually choose not to bind
results of intermediate computations when these are done for their side
effects. Extending *syntax-do* in this ways could actually be very
useful, since this gives the perfect hook for adding certain things that
are currently impossible to do via syntax-rules such as warnings and
Taylor's debug messages. For example:
(syntax-do (x <- ......)
(syntax-message "The intermediate result is:" x)
(syntax-if (atom? x)
(syntax-do (syntax-warning "Atoms may explode if split")
(y <- ......)
(syntax-message "y = " y)
(z <- ......)
.
.
Note that this would be an argument for keeping both the current <- arrows
and the current indentation and bracketing.
I am thinking of adding a section, perhaps called "Requests for future
extensions" for currently impossible things that could perhaps easily be
supported in future. I would include, for example,
syntax-debug-message
syntax-warning
syntax-string?
syntax-number?
...