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new draft Taylor Campbell (27 Feb 2005 19:46 UTC)
Re: new draft Paul Schlie (28 Feb 2005 01:29 UTC)
Re: new draft Taylor Campbell (13 Mar 2005 20:44 UTC)
Re: new draft Paul Schlie (14 Mar 2005 07:46 UTC)

Re: new draft Paul Schlie 14 Mar 2005 07:46 UTC

To begin with, I apologize for an over zealous response after misreading
your revised proposal; which I misinterpreted as formalizing the treatment
of sequential #;'s non-recursively (i.e. (#; #; a b c) -> (c)), which you've
actually denoted as an error, which much better than not; but please let me
try to propose a potentially somewhat simpler and cleaner similar approach.

- It may be simplest to define comment's grammar to be fully consistent
  with the language's existing reader abbreviations who's scope is
  consistently bounded by the subsequent fully recursively parsed <S-EXP>.
  (very similar to your revised proposal, but without any recursive limit)

  Thereby: using {} to denote the lexical bound of reader command, which
  can't be determined until all subsequently encountered opened scopes
  are themselves delimited; first showing only reader quote abbreviations:

      input: '(''`(a ,@(list 1 2 3) b))
     parsed: '{ ( '{ '{ `{ ( a ,@{ ( list 1 2 3 ) } b ) } } } ) }
    returns:  (quote ( (quote (quote (qq (a (uqs (list 1 2 3)) b)))))

  Correspondingly, if comment (quote-comment for the sake of argument),
  were given the exact same recursive <s-exp> grammar scoping rules, the
  only difference would be that rather than using it's immediately
  following recursively parsed <s-exp> as it's argument, it removes it
  and itself from the parsed expression (i.e commented out):

      input: '(#;#;a b `#;,c d #;'e)
     parsed: '{ ( #;{ #;{ a } } b `{ #;{ ,{ c } } } d #;{ '{ e } } )
    returns:  (quote (b d))

  Thereby things seem nice simple and symmetric; and to make things more
  ideally consistent, just as it's clear that commenting a quote expression
  effectively removes it, quoting an comment expression should be considered
  equivalent; thereby all quote forms (including quote-comment), return
  nothing if they have no/empty arguments (i.e. r5rs grammar "empty").

  Thereby it basically falls out for free, that:

    (') -> ( '{ <empty> } ) => ()

  As would:

   `(a ,b ,) -> '{(a ,{b} ,{ <empty> }) => (qq (a (uq b)))

  Thereby consistently eliminating otherwise needless nuisance errors for
  quotes with no arguments, which seems harmless, and would be consistent.

  Ultimately requiring only a few basic tweaks to scheme's grammar:

  #; [<s-exp>|<empty>] -> {comment [<s-exp>|<empty>]} => <empty>

  ['|`|,|,@] <empty> -> {quote/qq/uq/uqs <empty} => <empty>

  Where per r5rs, essentially <empty> is implied last in any list, or
  upon file/input termination (therefore should require no further tweaks).

-paul-