Lambda The Ultimate: use failure-thunk instead of default value?

[Tony Garnock-Jones <tonyg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some schemes (eg. mzscheme) have a hash-table-get with signature

  (hash-table-get hash-table key-v [failure-thunk])

using a failure-thunk instead of a default value. Most of the time I use
hash tables, I find this to be more elegant, and whenever I'm using a
scheme that uses default values instead of a failure-thunk, I find
myself eventually overriding the hash table accessor with my own custom
version because failure-thunks are so much more convenient. They feel a
bit like alternate continuations.

For instance, I prefer to write:

   (hash-table-get valmap id
                   (lambda () (error "Object does not contain slot"
                                     (desc-id-and-slot id slotname))))

rather than:

   (let* ((*failure* "failure")
          (result (hash-table-get valmap id *failure*)))
     (if (eq? result *failure*)
         (error "Object does not contain slot"
                (desc-id-and-slot id slotname))
         result))

The concision of the common default-value case can be regained with a
procedure "always":

  (define (always something) (lambda () something))

  (hash-table-get *forward-slots* id (always #f))

Regards,
  Tony