On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 1:38 PM Shiro Kawai <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

A user finds your map and my scan both takes reverse: keyword and wanted to abstract it.
But alas, two revese:'s are different identifiers. So he ask you and me to rewrite our libraries
to share reverse: keyword from a common library. Where to put such common library and
who'll maintain it? Well, the user don't care, and you and I have to talk to resolve it.

I anticipate this scenario to be very common. Will this scale?

It will not. That's what tanked Alex Shinn's otherwise elegant proposal for `define-keyword` and `keyword=?`. Keywords are variables bound to their own symbol (or a trivial record containing it), and keyword=? compares the symbol, but two modules can't export the same keyword definition without a common source. Maintaining an all-known-keywords library to import is unwieldy and hopeless to maintain.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan xxxxxx@ccil.org
Evolutionary psychology is the theory that men are nothing but horn-dogs,
and that women only want them for their money. --Susan McCarthy (adapted)