Bradd W. Szonye wrote:
> felix wrote:
>
>>Yet, I find SRFI-7 suboptimal, for various reasons I have already
>>given (less typing (yes!), more natural, more straightforward, more
>>portable - across existing implementations).
>
>
> I refrained the first time around, but I really must object to this
> "less typing" advantage. It's an extremely short-sighted reason to
> support a proposal. If you want less typing, use macros or scripts to do
> the typing for you. It's an extremely trivial advantage, and all too
> often it turns into a net disadvantage in the long run.

"less typing" is not the main reason, what also applies is that it
doesn't require another pair of parens (i.e. toplevel forms aren't
toplevel anymore). A very basic little issue, agreed, but why not
make things easy?

>
> As for more natural, more straightforward, more portable: The first two
> are aesthetic judgments, and obviously several people disagree with your
> subjective opinion.

How many syntactic issues are not aesthetic? SRFI-55 is a *user-interface*,
of course it's intended to be more aestethically pleasing.

Moreover, I'm absolutely convinced that several, if not the majority
of Scheme users (yes, even newbies count), will find it more natural
and convenient.

> The last makes no sense whatsoever; how is your
> proposal any more portable than SRFI-7?

Because most implementations already provide it (albeit under different
names). SRFI-7 appears to be unpopular among Scheme implementations, so
I consider it a failure.

cheers,
felix