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Re: Convenience forms and hygiene (1 of 3)

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 99 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 99 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



It is time to resolve this SRFI one way or another.

John Cowan wrote:
> I am concerned about the convenience features that the SRFI 99 syntactic
> layer adds to SRFI 9.  For the sake of being able not to specify the
> conventional names of the constructor, predicate, accessors, and mutators,
> it becomes impossible to implement the syntactic layer in syntax-rules
> alone (and therefore in fully portable R5RS), as SRFI-9 was.  I consider
> this too high a price for too little gain.

I agree, but a large number of Scheme programmers don't
agree with us.

One of the main purposes of this SRFI was to demonstrate
the possibility of devising an R6RS-like record system
whose procedural and syntactic layers are interoperable,
and how that system could be extended to implement R6RS
records in systems that (for whatever reason) require
them.  That demonstration would be less convincing if
the non-hygienic implicit naming were omitted from this
SRFI.

For that reason alone, I think the implicit naming should
remain part of this SRFI.

I would welcome another records SRFI that pays more
attention to the real needs of programmers and less to
the need to demonstrate how one could improve upon the
R6RS record system without dropping any of its features.

Will