> Verbose syntax worries me a lot if the eventual goal is that people
> write portable code whenever this can be done. If the portable code
> has to deal with the most complicated syntax, that's bad.

I think every keyword syntax is complicated compared to the procedure
call syntax that is currently in standard Scheme with no keywords of any
kind. That's just unavoidable.

The different syntaxes seem about equally complex to me. Some of them
are more verbose than others, but less verbose ones are more "magical"
so it's a trade-off. Depending on one's background, some syntaxes are
more intuitive and some less intuitive, which is a yet different metric.

> By the way, the proposal that just uses symbols to introduce keyword
> arguments is non-verbose and very portable and no less performant than
> most of the systems discussed here.

The current draft 2 of 177 uses just symbols, and as far as I'm
concerned, it's fine the way it is :) But other people didn't like it so
we had a thorough exploration of other possibilities, many of which are
also fine by me.