On 7/19/05, Jens Axel Søgaard <xxxxxx@soegaard.net> wrote:
> felix winkelmann wrote:
>
> > Uninterned symbols are (currently) not provided by standard Scheme,
> > and can be simulated by some magic prefix in portable code.
>
> Nevertheless, the section eqv? has the following note on symbols:
>
>    The eqv? procedure returns #t if:
>
>      * obj1 and obj2 are both symbols and
>
>        (string=? (symbol->string obj1)
>                  (symbol->string obj2))
>                    ===>  #t
>
>            Note:   This assumes that neither obj1 nor obj2 is an
>    ``uninterned symbol'' as alluded to in section 6.3.3. This report does
>    not presume to specify the behavior of eqv? on
>    implementation-dependent extensions.

Hey, another little piece of R5RS that I didn't know...

>
> Since some implementation do have uninterned symbols, it implies
> that it isn't great style to rely on the above.
>

Well, I'm usually very careful with broad "isn't great style"
generalisations. Uninterned
symbols do in fact complicate the (IMHO rather handy) assumption that
symbol->string and string->symbol 1:1 relationship. Gensyms are an
implementation
hack (used in 99% of all cases for "defmacro"-style macro programming). In fact,
I'd rather see a "(genguid)" than a "(gensym)" :-).

The problem is that I've seen numerous bodies of code (object-systems,
macro-expanders,
module systems, ...) that depend on some kind of "symbol-append" function and
convert back and forth between symbols and strings. In these cases a
1:1 relationship
is required as uninterned symbols may lead to unexpected things.

cheers,
felix