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Re: Property Lists




On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Richard Kelsey wrote:

>SRFI-9 is primarily a mechanism for creating new types.  A minimal
>approach would have been for each record to contain a single, immutable
>value.  The Scheme implementations mentioned above, along with many
>other programming languages, extend this by allowing multiple, mutable
>fields.   SRFI-9 specifies a common interface for this common feature.
>
>Hashtable-based property lists are a distinctly different, less common
>feature, and one that is usually not combined with creating new types.
>If you think it would be a better approach, then by all means write a
>SRFI for it.

Hmmm.  I may at that.  But before I go haring off after something that
may be redundant and/or too limited to be of value, I'd like to ask:
Why are record types preferred to property lists?  What is the problem
they solve that property lists do not?

			Bear