[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] [OT] #;<datum> comments useless

From: Trent Buck <trentbuck>
Date: Sat Sep 30 22:34:46 2006

On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 12:00:00PM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> Anton van Straaten wrote:
>> Also, the objection that #; makes it harder to see where the
>> comment ends applies equally to the Lisp/Scheme abbreviation for
>> QUOTE, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice -- in
>> fact, that abbreviation is one of the more useful syntactic
>> features of Lisp & Scheme.
>
> Well, those of us with bad eyes aren't that thrilled by having to
> distinguish between "`", "'" and "," but they traditional.

Since you use a smart editor, you could extend it to render `, ' and ,
as `QQ, 'Q and ,UQ respectively.

The same feature is sometimes used to display the identifier LAMBDA
using the greek character U+03BB. In Emacs:

    http://emacswiki.org/wiki/PrettyLambda

>> The remaining objections seem to boil down to the fact that it's
>> not an essential feature. That's true. Neither is the
>> abbreviation for QUOTE. But #; has been considered useful enough
>> that multiple Schemes implement it.
>
> None is listed in http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-implementers.html
> but of course it is difficult keeping it up to date.

The following systems appear to support #; out of the box:

    Chicken
    Gambit
    PLT
    Gauche

-- 
Trent Buck, Student Errant
Received on Sat Sep 30 2006 - 22:34:02 UTC

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