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Re: Just provide procedural interface

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 76 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 76 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.





On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Per Bothner wrote:

Andre van Tonder wrote:
In conclusion, the procedural/reflection interface is economical,
clean and simple. I suggest removing the syntactic libraries from the SRFI.

I disagree.  A declarative/syntactic interface is preferable:
- I believe it is easier to implement more efficiently.
- It is more compatible with (optional) static typing and type declarations.
- It is easier to optimize.
- I think it is easier to use and supports better style.

I.e. a declarative interface is what we should encourage libary writers, students, and textbooks to use. Hence it needs to be in R6RS. A procedural interface is useful for a few relatively rare/advanced applications, and it might be useful to *define* the declarative interface, but is definitely not as important in normal use.


You are right (I just posted a message where I changed my mind). Declarative is definitely better.

I believe it would be best if the declarative interface were (much) simplified. That there should only be one such layer, and that any "library" (non-primitive) features are best left for future SRFIs.

Cheers
Andre