This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 57 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 57 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
Greetings, and thanks for this SRFI - I like the ideas very much. Anyways, I'm going to nag about the parts I don't understand. My main problem is the relationship between SRFI-57 and SRFI-9. As far as features are concerned, this SRFI looks like a perfect extension to SRFI-9, yet it doesn't try to stay compatible with SRFI-9. Is there a good reason for changing the argument order and makeup of the DEFINE-RECORD macro from that specified in SRFI-9? I.e. that the predicate comes last, and that the fields are specified as a list of field specifiers instead of specifiers as separate arguments? If there's a good reason, please add that rationale to the SRFI document. If not, I'd greatly appreciate switching to the SRFI-9 syntax. The subtyping part of the SRFI is wonderful, but I'm missing a specification on what happens if someone subtypes two records with the same field name, but different accessors, or two records with the same accessors, but different field names. Also, would it be possible to renamed UPDATE and EXTEND to UPDATE-RECORD and EXTEND-RECORD? I think those names are clearer. Now on to the last part, the only part of the SRFI I absolutely don't like: The pattern matching facility. As you correctly say, it is outside the scope of SRFI-57 to specify a full-featured pattern matching facility - please don't try to specify a half-featured one, then. The pattern matching is not an inherent part of the record facilities, especially since it enforces one type of pattern matching. It would be much more useful to specify a full-fledged matcher in a separate SRFI. To conclude this email, I'd greatly appreciate this to be changed to a pure extension of SRFI-9, so that it's backward-compatible in all respects, and intended as such. Thanks for reading, -- Jorgen Schäfer -- ((email . "forcer@xxxxxxxxx") (www . "http://www.forcix.cx/") (gpg . "1024D/028AF63C") (irc . "nick forcer on IRCnet"))