Scheme language standardization process
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 string->symbol can create symbols from strings which are not in the usual lexical space of symbols (eg, strings that would normally be interpreted as numbers or delimiters, strings which contain spaces, etc. symbol->string, when applied to such symbols, must return the same string that was an argument to string->symbol. Does the standard really need to specify a read/write syntax for such symbols? I tend to think that specifying that symbol->string and string->symbol are inverses is actually all the standard needs to do. Because in writing portable code, I tend to think that if I really want to specify a symbol whose name contains a space, I would rather write (string->symbol "Foo bar") because it is drastically more clear in both intent and syntax, as well as more reliable across all implementations, than any of the escaped symbol notations under discussion. While arbitrary strings can need to be converted to symbols and back during execution of code, I'm not able to coming up with any scenario that requires their use in source code. FWIW, my own toy implementation treated the vertical bar as a symbol, and I have used it as a function name for a row polymorphic catenative application operator: It was basically a cheap trick to create a Forth-ish DSL. Bear -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJPXwrnAAoJEAOzWkqOibfNbHoH/0h6a+vq79peSB8S73SD84aR qRkEpN2dW5sRnsjERZizqAZjAxMTdL6nlT5C/6w/OkAorkRs1T4Fb1z3B+LKq1mq XSXmFMfO7Fk1ak1zg73tJDKuQXIsEOKyRpWEavH2Z6oLXNiU2bfV1gO7xTdVv+fr ojENq83o0geKxH/TK8J0iowvjpeuzRDj5gTI9yk10Fk6KOLMYRwfRnw+USH/apQ+ 0+Qad03IBNqHBLosyrf1C2NEaowB1N8pttgVMc8hC2oMhHkgfXbp2s4zu+r2KrVU 2b17JrE9yldwFwc7dQWQo21QpkTKsoQBkp7V/nPq0xKckUyV3XAjFeV6cQN5CAs= =fvaR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list Scheme-reports@x http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports