This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 110 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 110 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Mark H Weaver:
> I think this new draft is very promising. However, there's still one
> major piece missing: a description (in english) of what data structures
> are created. Somehow that needs to be integrated into this new text.
I'm not sure I understand. If by "data structure" you mean
n-expressions, those are already defined in SRFI-105.
It's really just s-expressions with a few tweaks.
> There's still a remnant of that in the SUBLIST bullet item, but it still
> uses the unclear terminology of the RHS becoming the "last parameter" of
> the LHS. That entire bullet item is still unclear to me.
>
> I still don't know what it means for "<A> to be made the last parameter
> of <B>". Even if I did, I don't like the use of "parameter" in the
> description of a datum reader. I'm glad that you tried to clarify what
> the RHS is ("including all child lines"), but it's still not clear how
> the RHS is converted into a datum. The LHS is still mysterious to me.
> Does it include parent lines? How is it converted into datum(s)?
>
> So IMO, you should find a clearer way to describe in english how these
> syntactic elements are converted into datums, and then you should
> integrate such descriptions into the whole of the "Basic specification",
> so that all of the rules are covered.
I'm open to ideas!
> I think that most readers will find the BNF quite intimidating, so it
> would be good if casual readers could obtain a reasonably clear
> understanding of the rules without reading the BNF.
I tried to do that earlier, and the rewrite tries to do that a little bit.
Suggestions?
> This new text is a great start,
> but IMO it needs to include an english description of the
> action rules as well.
I don't think that would help.
> Other than that, just a few minor points:
>
> * 'eol sequence: [...] (short for "horizontal space")'
> I guess that "horizontal space" is a mistake, no?
Whups! Fixed.
> * "simplifying simplifies" => "simplifying"
Fixed.
> * Re: "leading traditional abbreviation (quote, comma, backquote, or
> comma-at)": IMO, for readers that support the syntax-case
> abbreviations (#' #` #, #,@), I think that it ought to be _mandatory_
> for these to be handled in the same way as for (' ` , ,@).
I disagree. Many Scheme systems do not implement them or
implement some of these with very different semantics.
For example, the many Schemes that implement SRFI-10
do something completely different with "#,".
They've also been abandoned in R7RS.
A particular Scheme implementation is certainly *welcome* to
implement them, but those constructs are not portable to R5RS
or R7RS without sweet-expressions... this just continues the
status quo.
--- David A. Wheeler