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Re: on waste-of-time arguments....

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 75 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 75 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



"John.Cowan" <jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> What makes you think there's a "right answer"?  Why can't two or more
> different groups disagree?  We already have disagreement, as indicated
> by the various R5RS implementations, as to whether case-folding in ASCII
> identifiers is the right thing or not.

And in such cases we can simply *not standardize*.  If there is no
Right Answer, the great tradition of Scheme standardization has been
to hold off.  

> For that matter, I note that while the non-normative section 2.1 of
> R5RS says:
>
> 	The precise rules for forming identifiers vary among
> 	implementations of Scheme, but in all implementations a sequence
> 	of letters, digits, and "extended alphabetic characters"
> 	that begins with a character that cannot begin a number is an
> 	identifier. In addition, +, -, and ... are identifiers.
>
> the formal syntax in 7.1 prescribes a fixed syntax for identifiers that
> does not permit any such "extended alphabetic characters."

I think you have it backwards.  7.1 is not the normative section, 2.1
is.

Thomas