Re: Keywords reduced Lassi Kortela 20 Oct 2019 09:42 UTC

> IMO it is this belief that caused the uptake of R6RS to be so limited.

Thanks for the enlightening background on the standards and macro
systems. It was enjoyable reading.

> The goal of R7RS-large is to put vetted modules into
> people's hands that make development easy: writing large problems in
> portable Scheme is currently a lot like assembling a model ship inside a
> bottle.

177 was written from this exact frame of mind as well. If it's not
compatible with existing keywords, it will serve to fragment rather than
unify Scheme (if anyone adopts it at all). I explicitly set out to avoid
that XKCD standards situation (https://xkcd.com/927/).

> A Chez-specific implementation should certainly use syntax-case if it helps
> any.

AFAICT it would produce the same expansion as syntax-rules. No R6RS
Schemes except Guile and Sagittarius have native keyword arguments.
Dybvig is explicitly against native keywords in Chez, and his stance
makes sense from his point of view (doing work at compile-time and
staying close to R6RS).

Just benchmarked using case-lambda and one or two vectors instead of one
lambda and a plist. It's a bit slower.