[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Add symbol=? and boolean=?

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Submitter:      Lauri Alanko <la_at_iki.fi> 
Type of issue:  Enhancement
Priority:       Minor
R6RS Component: Base Library
Report version: 5.92
Summary:        Dedicated equivalence predicates for symbols and booleans.
Description:
I propose adding to the base library two new equivalence predicates
whose arguments are restricted to symbols and booleans.
One reason for this is simply consistency. It is customary for all
(non-singleton) types to have their own dedicated equivalence
predicates. Symbols and booleans seem to be the only exceptions.
The benefits of dedicated predicates would be the same as usual: in
contexts where the arguments are expected to be of a single fixed type,
they provide more information to the programmer and the compiler, and
better error checking. Especially symbol-only comparisons are very
common.
Currently, symbol comparisons are often done with eq?, which seems like
bad style, since eq? is a low-level optimization primitive with
implementation-dependent semantics. Providing an alternative would
hopefully encourage writing better-defined code.
I get the feeling that the reason for the lack of the predicates is that
symbols and booleans are already guaranteed to be comparable with eq?,
so the implementations cannot be anything but trivial. However, I think
the guarantees made for an optimization loophole shouldn't affect the
design of the rest of the language.
PLT Scheme's MzLib library currently provides these predicates, and they
seem to enjoy some minor usage.
Proposal:
Add to Section 9.10, page 46, the following:
    (boolean=? boolean1 boolean2)                      procedure
    Returns #t if boolean1 and boolean2 are both #t or both #f,
    otherwise returns #f.
Add to Section 9.12, page 49, the following:
    (symbol=? symbol1 symbol2)                         procedure
    Returns #t if symbol1 and symbol2 have the same name, otherwise
    returns #f.
In Section 9.6, page 37, change the definition of eqv? for symbols and
booleans to refer to the above procedures.