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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/