Re: here strings and symbols

[Sebastian Egner <sebastian.egner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thought about it some more...

The real issue I have in mind is the
lexical syntax of <identifier> (R5RS, 7.1.1).

The background of the issue is the following:
Sometimes I use
Scheme for 'rapid prototyping' in the
following way---a program
that has no idea about Scheme, e.g.
PostScript, externalizes
data in Scheme syntax. This data is
then either read into a
Scheme program, or (and that is the
tricky case) is directly
executed by a suitably primed Scheme
interpreter. Now in the
latter case, it can be exremely convenient
to reuse the identifiers
available in the substrate program (e.g.
PostScript).

The 'reuse of identifiers' part requires
that the substrate's
identifiers can be turned into Scheme
identifiers (and often
also back). This usually makes me write
my own escaping mechanism,
which shouldn't be necessary at all
if Scheme would be more liberal
about the names of identifiers. (For
the record, I prepend a tag,
e.g. "ps:", to the names to
make sure they don't get in the way.)

Now for Scheme going Unicode, it would
be a relief to see that
an identifier can consist of arbitary
characters, if need be.
A simple quoting mechanism, e.g. |...|
as in PLT, would already do
most of the job, but 'here identifiers'
could finish it off.

This still doesn't mean that I am fully
in favor of 'here identifiers' etc.
but I would like to see arguments for
and against a liberal identifier
syntax. So far I haven't read so many
in the discussion, yet.

Sebastian.