This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 13 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 13 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Per Bothner wrote:
> Even in this context of pure data (as opposed to procedure calls),
> builtin keyword support has teh advantage that keywords are
> self-evaluating, and they are distinct from normal symbols.
The whole point of quoted data is that they are not evaluated, so I
see no benefit at all to the fact that keywords are self-evaluating.
In a quoted context, I can just as well use symbols, with whatever
syntactic form you want. Some people might prefer colons:, others
*stars*, and still others <<ducks feet>>.
> I don't know where this is coming from - I see keywords as completely
> orthogonal to objects.
Since others have asked also -- the paper Classes and Mixins (Flatt,
Krishnamurthi, Felleisen, POPL 98) elucidates this in (a little) more
detail on the first page. The same goes for optional arguments.
'shriram
PS: Since this is really diverging from SRFI-13, I think it would be
best to take further messages on this to c.l.s.