[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Allow compilers to reject obvious violations

From: Arthur A. Gleckler <arthur>
Date: Mon Feb 26 15:40:11 2007

On Feb 26, 2007, at 11:48 AM, Pascal Costanza wrote:

> By your accounting, I am in that list. I don't regard myself in
> that list, so I am sorry if I have given the wrong impression here.
> I'll try to clarify: Implementations should be given discretion to
> both run parts of programs even if other parts appear to be
> incorrect, as well as to completely reject running programs that
> are provably incorrect. I regard this a quality feature of an
> implementation, and it should be left to the "market" which
> approach "wins." It shouldn't be part of a language specification,
> IMHO.

Just to be clear, do you mean "...as well as to completely reject
running [entire] programs that [contain parts that] are provably
incorrect?" That's the distinction I'm worried about.

I don't mind if this program can't run:

   )(*$#%()*#$

I just want to be able to test FACTORIAL in this program without
having to fix FOO:

   (define (factorial n) (if (< n 2) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

   (define (foo) (factorial))

Of course, this is a contrived example. This problem only becomes
important when FOO is a large body of code, not just a one-liner.
Received on Mon Feb 26 2007 - 15:39:45 UTC