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On 11-Apr-06, at 5:51 PM, Taylor R. Campbell wrote:
I'm posting this merely for the sake of offering another opinion on legibility; I don't think that any syntax changes in this area are good, because they can break existing and compliant R5RS code. For instance, I've seen this naming convention somewhere: FOO has to do with an exclusive interval, FOO: with an interval exclusive on the lower bound and exclusive on the upper bound, :FOO with an interval inclusive on the lower bound and exclusive on the upper bound, and :FOO: with an inclusive interval. For another example, SRFI 42 would break if the meaning of a colon prefix were changed in Scheme's lexical identifier syntax, although if any extension were to be made I'd prefer the colon prefix.
I'm not sure I understand your point. I'm advocating for a colon suffix. SRFI 42 uses a colon prefix on identifiers (which by the way is illegal in R5RS except for a lone colon). So keyword objects using a colon suffix syntax do not hinder in any way SRFI 42 or any R5RS compliant code, but a colon prefix syntax does.
I know that some code has used colon suffixes on identifiers (for example the withdrawn iota: function in SRFI 1), but there are very few uses of this and it is not portable anyway so I don't think this argument has much weight.
Marc