Re: R6RS query

Pascal Costanza <pc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 19/12/2009 06:47, Peter Keller wrote:
Why does it matter what average programmers do and don't understand?
Should a language be worse just because its users are worse? That
doesn't seem to make a lot of sense...

I'm not saying we should get rid of call/cc. I'm saying it wouldn't be a
point of comparison to people idly looking at Scheme-like languages.

Also, I think there is a common viewpoint, which I personally don't adhere to,
that because things like (when ...) and whatnot _can be written_ in Scheme,
Scheme _shouldn't provide it_ in a standard out of "elegance". In reality,
people simply want those definitions, they don't want to have to write them,
and they want them to be working.

If this means that things like that end up in a standard library, fine
by me. In fact, this is what happened with R6RS, and I thought it was
a great idea. I genuinely hope the standard library section of R7RS is
preserved and expanded.

This is an abstract discussion. A more concrete discussion would be
this: "Clojure does XYZ, and it's goood. How do we get XYZ into an RNRS?"

So, what XYZs do you have in mind?

Multimethods and metadata (on any object, instead of just the couple
that Clojure performs). Those are the two that I've actually wished for
in Scheme when writing it.

Once you have multimethods, you can probably get the sequence idea from
Common Lisp and associated functions, like (remove ...) that works on
vectors, strings, lists, hashes: (remove 'key hash) depending on the
arguments.

-pete
.

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