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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.



Aubrey Jaffer wrote:

It cuteness is the only objection anyone makes, I'll take that as
consensus.

OK, I'll be stronger: I think the integer-16 vs integer+16 convention
is ugly and violates the principle of "least surprise".  If somebody
sees "uinteger16" or "uint16" or "uinteger-16" most programmers can
probably guess the meaning, or at least figure out where to look.
But I would have no idea that "integer+16" means "unsigned".

The words "signed" and "unsigned" do not occur in R4RS or R5RS;
neither does "int".  Scheme owes nothing to C, except for looking so
fine in comparison.

But "uinteger16" is still a reasonable and non-confusing abbreviation
for "exact-16-bit-nonnegative-integer".  But if you disagree, I'd still
much prefer rather have "nonnegative-integer-16" over "integer+16".

As discussed earlier, shorter names necessarily omit some of the
numerical attributes.  The fully specified Scheme names would be:

  inexact-IEEE-64-bit-floating-point-real-array
  inexact-IEEE-32-bit-floating-point-real-array

Right, but I'd still argue that "float-32" is a better abbreviated
name than "real-32".
--
	--Per Bothner
per@xxxxxxxxxxx   http://per.bothner.com/