Re: [Chicken-users] Re: [Chicken Gazette - Issue 13] - ##sys#:keyword:'s

[Felix]

From: Jörg "F. Wittenberger" <address@hidden>
Subject: [Chicken-users] Re: [Chicken Gazette - Issue 13] - ##sys#:keyword:'s
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:47:51 +0100

> Am Montag, den 22.11.2010, 21:22 +0100 schrieb Peter Bex:
>> On Saturday another new thread (!) was started by Alan Post in which
>> he reported a bug in Chicken's keyword argument handling. He created a
>> ticket in Trac to help track this bug, but with the help of Alex and
>> Felix he found out it was not a bug in Chicken but in his own code;
>> `string->symbol` does not produce keyword objects even when the string
>> ends with a colon. After he changed his code to use `string->keyword`
>> everything worked as it should. Keywords can be confusing things:
>> they're not quite the same as symbols because they're self-evaluating,
>> yet `symbol?` returns `#t`.
>> 
> May I ask a simple question: what is the actual rational behind keywords
> (wrt. symbols)?

They provide a syntactically and semantically distinct "marker" for things like
argument lists.

> 
> Are there any good references?

Unfortunately not. Others have pointed out DSSSL, you can also
check out the bigloo and gambit documentation, but they don't
provide much more than the Chicken manual.

> 
> Could we do away with them?

Why? Should we? 

> 
> Boil them down to mere read syntax?  ( 'x same as x: ?)
> 

That would make them indistinguishable from normal
symbols, and thus would make their usage more error-prone,
I think.


cheers,
felix