Re: Identifiers starting with ":"
Peter McGoron 24 Jun 2026 20:32 UTC
> Bigloo, Sagittarius and STklos will by default treat such identifiers
as keywords, not symbols.
Oh man, I forgot about keyword objects.
Originally this SRFI just exported `+`, `-`, etc. without prefixes. The
expectation was, you would always import the identifiers with a prefix,
like `fl` or `fl32:`. The issue is
1. Those conflicted with the usual identifiers, and R7RS doesn't define
what happens when two imported identifiers conflict.
2. Identifiers like |1/e| require escaping without prefixes. (R7RS has
identifier escaping, I don't know if Bigloo has it too. R6RS doesn't,
although it's a common extension.)
We can't use `-` or `=` as a prefix because it's already used for
subtraction. Underscore would look ugly and might conflict with using
underscores as a separator for numbers.
I would like to change the identifier prefix to something else, though
to what I don't know.
-- Peter McGoron