Re: [Scheme-reports] ANN: first draft of R7RS small language available

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

Hi Peter, thanks for the comments!

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 10:59 PM, Peter Bex <Peter.Bex@x> wrote:
>
> Section 4.3.2:
>
> Why is it neccessary to define underscore as a specially-treated
> wildcard? [...]
>
> I might be missing something but AIUI when an underscore doesn't appear
> in the <template> part of a <syntax rule>, the behaviour of that macro
> is exactly the same whether the underscore is treated as a wildcard or
> not.

The only difference is if you use multiple wildcards in the pattern,
which would have been an error in R5RS.  I'm not particularly fond
of the syntax, but I suppose it helps if you have lots of subpatterns
that you don't care about and don't want to think up descriptive
names.

> Section 6.3.7:
>
> The blob interface could be simplified by getting rid of
> partial-blob and partial-blob-copy! and making blob-copy and blob-copy!'s
> signatures accept optional arguments:

I agree, I'll add a ticket for this.

> Section 7.1:
>
> This says case is insignificant in the BNF; but it isn't really when the
> Scheme is not in case-folding mode.  Possibly only for #x and a few
> others?  For example, are the <expression keyword>s case-insensitive?
> If case is insignificant, why are there uppercase letters under
> <hex digit>?

The BNF is case-insensitive.  The uppercase letters in <hex digit> are
for emphasis.  I thought I had removed the <expression keywords>s
and <syntactic keywords> - Scheme has no reserved words, and I'm
not sure what the original motivation for them was.

-- 
Alex

_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
Scheme-reports@x
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports