Scheme Request for Implementation 220,
"Line directives,"
by Lassi Kortela,
has gone into withdrawn status.

The document and an archive of the discussion are available at https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-220/.

Here is Lassi's summary of the reasons for withdrawal:

While this SRFI solves the problem it set out to solve, and could be used as-is, the mailing list disagreed with it on aesthetic grounds. No maintainers of established Scheme implementations commented on the proposal.

Hence the SRFI is withdrawn. The document and the mailing list archive stay as a reference for future discussions on the topic.

Particular points of contention:

• Whether source code comments should ever be parsed or not.

• Whether magic comments are a horrible aesthetic blemish or an acceptable trade-off to embed external syntax into a programming language.

• Whether Scheme's #! read syntax should be kept strictly for Scheme datums or overloaded to also handle external syntax.

• Whether Unix-style #!/usr/bin/scheme shebang lines should be incorporated into Scheme syntax in some way, or removed in a

pre-processing step so the Scheme reader never sees them. (Both approaches are currently in use by Scheme implementations.)

Here is the commit summary since the most recent draft:

• Add withdrawal notice
• Withdraw.

Regards,


SRFI Editor