On Fri, 2009-11-13 at 08:55 -0500, Marc Feeley wrote:
> > On 11/13/09, Thomas Bushnell BSG <xxxxxx@becket.net> wrote:
> >> I'll admit that, along with Kent Dybvig, I'm no fan of arity
> >> inspection,
> >> for a jillion reasons.  I think it's ill-conceived.
> >>
> >> But if it must happen, how about this:
> >>
> >> (procedure-arity PROC) returns two values, first, the minimum
> >> number of
> >> arguments, and second, whether additional arguments are permissible.
> >> This exactly covers the possibilities for standard Scheme.  It is
> >> trivial to implement given any of the common facilities out there.
> >> It
> >> is clear and simple and easy to specify.
> >>
>
> Then what is (procedure-arity read) ?

(procedure-arity read) => 0, #t

After all, read looks something like:

(define (read . args)
  (cond
    ((null? args) (read-from-port (current-input-port)))
    ((not (null? (cdr args))) (error "bad call to read"))
    (else (read-from-port (car args)))))

Remember: an arity "match" does not mean that your arguments, or even
the number of them, is acceptable.  This is one of the reasons Dybvig
objected to the very concept of an arity tester--people will think that
a "match" means that the number of arguments is ok.

Thomas