[r6rs-discuss] Hashes in the number syntax

From: dyb_at_cs.indiana.edu <dyb>
Date: Wed Nov 22 15:25:43 2006

Speaking not as an editor...

> I searched an additional ~140Mb of Scheme source. ...

I wouldn't expect to find many occurrences, if any, in Scheme source code.
For that matter, I rarely see inexact constants of any kind in Scheme
source code.

Instead, I would expect it to appear primarily in the output of programs
that print floating point numbers (say using some implementation-specific
mechanism for specifying the number of digits) or possibly in input data
sets.

Regardless, I agree that the hash syntax is probably not often used, but I
think it's a useful notation and will be even more useful (and more used)
once we standardize on formatted output. The cost to support it is small:
the syntax occupies a syntactic space that is not likely to be useful for
anything else, and the added reader complexity is minimal.

> I believe that nobody uses this notation, and that it should be dropped
> from R6.

The syntax is used, at least by Chez Scheme's formatted I/O, as I noted in
an earlier note.

Kent
Received on Wed Nov 22 2006 - 15:25:33 UTC