lists in enclosed expression Per Bothner (13 May 2013 20:19 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression John Cowan (13 May 2013 22:25 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression Per Bothner (13 May 2013 22:43 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression John Cowan (13 May 2013 22:59 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression Per Bothner (21 May 2013 00:40 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression John Cowan (21 May 2013 02:02 UTC)
Re: lists in enclosed expression Per Bothner (22 May 2013 20:58 UTC)

Re: lists in enclosed expression John Cowan 21 May 2013 02:02 UTC

Per Bothner scripsit:

> For Kawa I'm considering allowing '"@" expression' in general
> application context.  Thus: (fexp @aexp) would be equivalent to:
> (apply fexp aexp) except aexp can be a list *or* a vector.

A newbie asked something in #scheme which led me to wonder why we don't
let (a b . c) mean (apply a b c) in Scheme code.  After all, we got rid
of `funcall` by treating the head of a procedure call uniformly; why
can't we get rid of `apply` by treating the improper tail of a call
uniformly?

Alas, that means the tail can't be a combination, only an identifier or
a constant, since (apply x (foo bar)) can't become (x . (foo bar)).
Oh well.

> Another issue is the interaction with format specifiers.

I personally detest these: I much prefer Alex Shinn's fmt library
<http://synthcode.com/scheme/fmt> and hope it becomes the formatting
solution for R7RS-large.  Much cleaner, more Schemey, and easier to
extend coherently.

> I'm leaning towards deferring the issue to a separate SRFI to handle
> $splice$ more generally.

Given these complications, I'm inclined to agree.

--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
        --Nicholas van Rijn
                John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org>
                    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan