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Re: #\a octothorpe syntax vs SRFI 10

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 58 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 58 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



This part of the Scheme standard (and the parts it refers to):

  #e #i #b #o #d #x
     These are used in the notation for numbers (section *note Syntax
     of numerical constants::.).

was a mistake.   It means, for example that

	#xafebabe

is a number whereas 

	#cafebabe

is not.  Yet the space of things that "fit in" with Scheme's top-level
approach to delimeters and identifiers suggests that every token of
the (abstractly stated) form

	#<IDENTIFIER>

should be treated the same way.   In essense, the number syntax is a
very "selfish" allocation of the available syntactic space under
octothorpe (and now, in this thread, people seem to want to
recapitulate and lock-in that error).

Would it have killed people to write:

	#x"afebabe"

or

	#array (<array-spec> <data> ....)



-t