On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Scott G. Miller wrote:

>First, its definitely a good thing to see hashtables get SRFI
>treatment.  It would be a shame though if they weren't defined as
>compatible with SRFI-44, whose purpose is to unify datastructures so
>that they can be used generically and consistently in programs.

I think srfi-44 fails to do that.  It doesn't provide
any infrastructure with a way for collection code to
"register" itself so as to be usable via generic functions,
so there is absolutely no "pluggable interface" in a code
sense.

>This basically only entails a little effort in procedure naming, and
>in providing compatible fold functions.  It would be nice to say also
>that implementations that support SRFI-44 must support the hashtables
>for the generic elements of SRFI-44.

Further, folding enumerators aren't particularly meaningful
operations on hash tables, because hash tables lack a concept
of ordering.  I don't think that hash tables *ought* to
provide them, because they will encourage naive users to do
horribly inefficient things.

			Bear