Re: [Scheme-reports] Formal Comment: Change syntax of symbols from |<symbol element>*| to #"<string element>*"

[John Cowan <cowan@x>]

Arthur Smyles scripsit:

> A survey to see what other implementations use #"..." for would be 
> useful. My impression is that it is rarely used.

It is rarely used.  Of my 39 test Schemes, only Racket, Gambit, Larceny,
IronScheme, Shoe, and and XLisp do something other than error out as
soon as they see #" -- but in most of these cases, I don't know what they
are actually doing.

> Given that eggs will be 
> broken, whichever way the working group decides, I believe it is better 
> to reduce the amount of special characters to allow maximum flexibility 
> for naming in the identifier lexical space. 

On the other hand, Racket, Gauche, MIT, Gambit, Chicken, Bigloo,
Kawa, SISC, Chibi, Chez, Ikarus/Vicare, STklos, KSi, Rep, Oaklisp, and
Owl Lisp all understand |...| syntax.  Scsh, Guile, SCM, NexJ, Shoe,
TinyScheme, Dream, Scheme 7, BDC, Elk, UMB, VX treat | as an ordinary
identifier character.  Scheme48, Larceny, Ypsilon, Mosh, SigScheme,
RScheme, XLisp, Schemik all report syntax errors.  IronScheme gets hung
up reading characters from the input.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan@x  http://ccil.org/~cowan
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.
        --Hal Abelson

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