I read this SRFI with interest. It will be nice to have a stable interface to the Map ADT, if for no other reason than to help avoiding the temptation to overuse/misuse alists. Here are some rough comments (mostly minor/clarifications) on the SRFI-146 draft (first) of 2016-12-18. * (meta) Since many parts of this SRFI mirror parts of SRFI 113, some of the following issues may reflect a larger confusion on my part. Nevertheless, I think clarifications in this SRFI may help. * Regarding the first issue noted in the SRFI, would it make sense to consider an alternate name for maps? Of course, "map" in the key-value sense is well established, but I think the name-clash with the higher-order map is quite awkward (e.g., map-map, map-map->list, ...). Perhaps 'dict' or some other such name? * The use of 'codomain' in the abstract confuses me. To me, it seems more natural to refer to the domain of keys and (perhaps) the codomain of values, given the usual key->value mapping. * I am also confused by the parenthetical remark in the last paragraph of the Rationale: "Multi-sets (i.e., relations)...". I can imagine a multi-set as a relation from the domain of its elements to nonnegative integers (denoting number of occurrences), but I suspect I am missing something more obvious here. I am interpreting multi-sets as bags (cf. SRFI 113). Now it occurs to me perhaps multi-maps are meant here. * In the Linear update section, second item under "benefits to this convention": I don't understand how programmers may continue to assume maps are functional data structures in the presence of potential side-effects of the "!" procedures. Is the intention that this assumption can be made provided no "!" procedures are used? * In description of make-map: "set" in second sentence should read "map", and perhaps "elements" should read "associations" for consistency. * For map-set and map-set!, I assume the number of 'arg's has to be even but the specification does not seem to require that, strictly speaking. * Is the motivation for map-delete-all and map-delete-all! avoiding having to use 'apply' with a large number of arguments (potentially unsupported by an implementation)? * For map-search, is it an error if the failure and success procedures call their continuation arguments in non-tail positions, or more generally do something else with the given continuations? I would imagine so, but the phrasing in terms of "expected" made me wonder (not sure if unexpected use in this context is error). * Are the two lists returned by map-entries guaranteed to be ordered consistently by the associations (i.e., such that the i'th key from the first list maps to the i'th value from the second)? I would guess not, but a clarification either way may be useful. * Would it make sense to add procedures similar to map-keys, map-values, and map-entries that return SRFI 113 sets and bags instead of lists (for potential efficiency gains by avoiding intermediate lists before using list->set etc.)? Perhaps not; just a thought. * Submaps section, first sentence: "sets" should be "maps". * Submaps section: Probably implied, but it may be helpful to state explicitly that equality of associations is defined as equality of their keys and values (especially since in earlier procedures the comparisons are limited to keys). * For the linear-update procedures, is it correct that they may (potentially) side-effect multiple 'map' parameters? That seems to make sense to me, but the explanation in the "Linear update" section says "... side-effect *one* of their parameters" (emphasis mine). This question probably only makes sense for the last four procedures in "Set theory operations" (which I think are the only !-procedures with multiple maps). * Does map-xor (and map-xor!) take exactly two arguments (by analogy with SRFI 113 set-xor), or at most two? In any case, a clarification/restriction of the "..." in the signature would be helpful. * I found the last paragraph of the Comparators section a bit confusing. My understanding is that it specifies that the default comparator (in the SRFI-128 sense) for maps is obtained by invoking make-map-comparator on the default comparator for the value portions of those maps. But I am not sure. Some clarification/elaboration here may be useful. Also, in light of the earlier comment on maps with keys that are maps themselves, it may be worth noting the analogous case (though perhaps obvious) for maps with values that are maps (which is where the above would be more interesting, I think). * (minor) In some cases, the explanation of a linear-update version of a procedure repeats the explanation for the functional version. Given the explanation earlier in the SRFI, I think it may be clearer/shorter just to say "foo! linear update version of foo" unless there is some unusual detail. * very minor typos: explicitely, thre * Somewhat tangential: Are there plans for (optional) procedures for ordered versions of maps (and sets)? I think the ordered versions are often useful (cf. SortedMap, SortedSet in Java). In particular, if the underlying implementation (e.g., red-black trees) makes it easy to access elements in order then it seems odd to not suggest exposing that functionality in a standard way. Regards, -chaw