Re:

xxxxxx@cs.indiana.edu writes:

> * The SRFI 72 model would be an incompatible change affecting a large
>    corpus of syntax-case macros written over the dozen or so years
> since
>    syntax-case was introduced.  Furthermore, identifying the places
>    affected by the change would be nontrivial.

This argument contradicts the statement in the June 2006 R6RS status
report:

> With respect to future viability, we operate under the assumption
> that many more Scheme programs will be written in the future than
> exist in the present, so the future programs are those with which
> we must be most concerned.

I noticed this for two reasons.

The first was that the authors of SRFI-77 don't seem to have any
problem removing quotient and remainder, which match hardware
operations on nearly every known architecture, and which I'm sure
many, many more programs use than use syntax-case.  If there is a
hardware architecture that has single instructions for the proposed
div or mod on small integers, I don't know what it is.

The second is that I have not not yet written a syntax-case macro,
and I don't want to be saddled with an error-prone for complex macro
systems, but "benefits macros that are self-contained",
standardization of syntax-case.  It is still painful to think of
years of debugging subtle errors in fixnum and flonum declarations in
Gambit, for example, without having a "build in tests to tell me when
I've lied to the compiler" declaration.

Brad