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Marc Feeley wrote:
My feeling is that the colon character does not belong in symbols anyway (either in the middle or at the end). It should be reserved as an infix operator to denote a qualified reference to a module (i.e. foo:bar should mean the thing called bar in the module foo). Many programming languages use such a notation, and in fact many Scheme programs use this notation for their own 90%-solution modules.
Kawa uses colon more generally as a "component-extraction" operator. See http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/PathExpressions.html Basically the reader translates expression:name to: ($lookup$ expression 'name) and then the $lookup$ operation does the appropriate thing depending on the type of expression. This includes Java field and method lookup, and namespace/package lookup. There are various compile-type optimizations, plus some kludges for quoting, and for backwards compatibility with code that uses colons in identifiers. It's a more general and elegant solution (in my not-so-humble opinion, of course) than the "JavaDot" notation used in some other Java-based Scheme implementations. -- --Per Bothner per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/