Re: [Scheme-reports] Boolean hemlines

[Marc Feeley <feeley@x>]

On 2012-04-12, at 7:51 AM, Alex Shinn wrote:

> I encourage people to think about and continue discussing this
> issue.  I thought about it for a long time myself and didn't vote
> lightly.  But at the current time no new arguments have been
> raised, and we therefore have no grounds for re-opening the ticket.


The issue I see with the Boolean datums is that they are fundamental and used all over the place in code (new and old).  I'm worried that very simple new code (such as tutorials and one liner examples) written with the new syntax, will not work in many non-R7RS Scheme implementations.  That's going to cause a lot of confusion.

Also, if there are two syntaxes, which one is used by the printer (write, pretty-print, etc)?  I would find it very confusing to see things like:

> #true
#t
> (pp (lambda () #true))
(lambda () #t))

I very much like the #T/#F syntax as it achieves the goal of making the two Booleans visually distinct, and perfectly compatible with R5RS.  The upper-case version could be the canonical external representation, so:

> #t
#T
> #f
#F

which is a behavior needing much less explanation for novices.

Marc


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