On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Michael Sperber wrote:

>>> Andre van Tonder <xxxxxx@later.het.brown.edu> writes:
>>>
>>>> - Why do the field /name/s in the procedural layer /not/ need to be
>>>>   distinct?
>>>>   I could see this feature causing lots of pain.
>>>
>>> What kinda pain?
>>
>> [... lots ...]
>
> So I believe the positive rationale is that the field names might get
> generated by a macro based on the number of fields, where it's
> difficult to impossible (SYNTAX-RULES) or awkward (SYNTAX-CASE) to
> generate unique names.  You got any answers for that?

I don't quite understand.  In this case, could you not generate the names at
runtime when executing make-record-type?  Since with the current SRFI, your
hypothetical syntax-rules macro presumably will use the same name for all the
fields, the symbolic names cannot matter and you'll have to do positional
indexing anyway.

I believe something stronger than syntax-rules has to be available anyway just
to implement this SRFI, but that's probably beside the point :-)

Cheers
Andre