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Re: rationale?

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 88 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 88 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Taylor R. Campbell wrote:
I'm missing one part of the rationale:  Why do we need a separate data
type?  Even in Common Lisp, keywords are symbols.

Common Lisp does have compound symbols, where a symbol comprises a
package and a package-local name.  But while the CL keyword ":foo"
is a symbol, it is different from the symbol "foo" because it is
in a different package.

A plausible solution is to introduce two-level names, as in CL.
That has a number of uses.  For example they could model XML's
two-level names.  However, I wouldn't want Common Lisp's rather
complex package semantics.  The problem is CL uses packages for
module visibility/import/export in an awkward way.

What we need are two predicates:
1: (general-symbol? x)
2: (simple-symbol? x) - which is true iff (general-symbol? x) and
   x is in the default unnamed package.
Standard R5RS symbols satisfy simple-symbol?.  Keywords, and the
special forms like #!optional satisfy general-symbol? but not
simple-symbol?.

The "legacy predicate" symbol? should be equivalent to one of
general-symbol? or simple-symbol? but I'm not sure which.  A
factor is an implementation may want to provide keywords without
full two-level symbols.
--
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/