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Re: [Scheme-reports] display should not guarantee termination



On Thursday, November 22, 2012 09:22:06 PM John Cowan wrote:
> Per Bothner scripsit:
> > I think this is wrong, and (arguably) misunderstands what
> > display is about, which IMO is to produce plain unadorned
> > human-readable output without extra delimiters.  Infinite
> > data structures should produce infinite output.  
> 
> How can infinite output be human-readable?  Humans don't have infinite
> life spans.  Infinite output can be truncated by another process, but
> in that case `write-simple` or `write-string` is probably the Right Thing.

Did we actually vote to make display terminating? I thought that we only voted 
on the behavior of write, which is different than display. Making write 
terminate by default is IMO the only sane choice, but the behavior of display 
is quite a different matter, and I know of fewer implementations that take the 
terminating display approach when dealing with cycles compared to terminating 
write.

-- 
Aaron W. Hsu | arcfide@x | http://www.sacrideo.us
Programming is just another word for the lost art of thinking.


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