Do we support any means of creating disjoint user-defined types, such as in SRFI-9, SRFI-99 or the R6RS record system?
WG1 voted srfi-9 before. New arguments against filter constructors were raised, so the ticket was re-opened.
References:
This is what we voted on before, it's extremely widely supported, and I remain unconvinced of the alternatives. Filtering constructors can be a useful convenience (and optimization) in some circumstances.
Do we provide any binary input or output ports, and if so how do we construct them and operate on them? Can binary and textual operations be mixed on the different port types?
PortsCowan provides binary port operations along with other extensions.
PortsShinn provides binary port operations, with similar operations to BinaryPortsCowan but keeping the binary/textual ports disjoint.
R6RS provides an entirely new I/O system, as well as a separate R5RS-compatible I/O system.
The withdrawn SRFI-91 provides yet another I/O system supporting binary ports.
Note this item as well as #29 and #31 specify semi-orthogonal aspects of I/O systems which are typically specified together by individual proposals. If the same proposal doesn't win for all three, the aspects will be merged as needed.
WG1 voted weakly in favor of cowan before.
In R6RS auxiliary keywords (such as else in cond and case forms) are explicitly exported from the (rnrs base (6)) library. Do we want to bind and export these from the core library?
If else is bound in the default module, then it must be imported at the call site whenever using it in cond or it won't match hygienically.
If else is not bound in the default module, then it must not be bound or imported at the call site whenever using it in cond or it won't match hygienically.
Another option is to specify for cond and case that they match the else identifier literally, ignoring any hygiene. This breaks compatibility with R5RS and R6RS.
WG1 voted unbound previously. New issues were brought up on the list so the ticket was re-opened.
References:
I'm reversing my former preference on this. Keywords in Scheme are broken, but we can't break hygiene and we need to decide whether they are bound or not in this standard, pending future improvements. Leaving keywords unbound allows multiple unrelated macros to use the same keywords, but Chez breaks in this case. Fortunately, for the keywords used in the standard, all macros can refer to the same bindings, so I recommend we bind them and perhaps recommend third-party modules to _not_ bind their keywords.
We need a naming convention for the core modules and standard libraries of the new module system.
The existing break down is based on John Cowan's earlier proposal of factorings in items #71, #72, #73, #74, #75, #76, #77, as well as an I/O module breakdown in PortsCowan. There have been various tickets proposing changing this, so we are re-opening the ticket.
I prefer Medernach's proposal to my own here.
Now that we have blobs, we have to decide what to call them. R6RS uses bytevector, SRFI-4 and SRFI-68 uses u8vector, while the original WG1 proposal used blob (which is therefore the default).
This is pure bikeshedding, and the charter makes it clear we should prefer the R6RS option when there is no good reason otherwise.
In R5RS syntax such as #t#f is left unspecified - some readers may parse this as the true literal followed by false. R6RS requires identifiers, characters, booleans, number objects, and . to be terminated with a "delimiter" or by the end of input.
References:
This is an ambiguity in R5RS that has no benefit and should be clarified.
In R5RS foo#f is a valid identifier, whereas R6RS requires # to act as a delimiter, so that this would parse as the identifier foo followed by the false literal.
Several implementations make use of this for extended identifier syntax.
This is a change also made by R6RS (and CL).
References:
I'm unconvinced. The use cases seem rare (especially since WG1 has no low-level macros), and the semantics not obvious.
References:
This is a change also made by R6RS.
We need a better rationale. Do any implementations do this, and why?
This is a change also made by R6RS, specifically:
A quasiquote expression may return either fresh, mutable objects or literal structure for any structure that is constructed at run time during the evaluation of the expression. Portions that do not need to be rebuilt are always literal. BEFORE is called whenever execution enters the dynamic extent of the call to THUNK and AFTER is called whenever it exits that dynamic extent. Jeronimo Pellegrini scripsit: > According to Section 6.7.1, "Conversely, not all character ports are > binary ports -- for example, the /string ports/ discussed below". It > is not really clear to wether the document *requires* string ports not > to be binary or if it was just an example of a port that *could* be > character but not binary. I haven't thought about it, but I guess it *could* be the latter, if the environment provides a default encoding for string ports. Existing features of IEEE Scheme may be removed only if a strong case can be made that they are fundamentally flawed. Insofar as practical, the language should be backwards compatible with the IEEE standard, the R5RS standard, and an appropriate subset of the R6RS standard. Unfortunately, most programming languages give nondescript names such as DIV(IDE), QUOT(IENT), MOD(ULO), and REM(AINDER) to these operations. The language should make clear to programmers what division operations their programs are performing, especially when negative dividends and divisors can arise, but perhaps may not often arise during testing. [...] The R5RS gives the names quotient and remainder to the truncating division operator pair, and the name modulo to the remainder half of the flooring division operator pair. For all these three procedures in the R5RS, the dividend may be any integer, and the divisor may be any nonzero integer.
On the other hand, we may prefer relegating them to a backward-compatibility module.
Vote "yes" to keep, "no" to remove, and "module" to relegate to a module.
Too big a change.
R6RS specifies the domain of finite? and nan? as the real numbers only. I propose that finite? return #t on a non-real value iff both the real part and the imaginary part are finite and not +nan.0, and that nan? return #t on a non-real value iff either the real or the imaginary part is +nan.0.
This seems reasonable assuming the implementations have such numbers.
R5RS does not actually specify any procedures which return multiple values, and so the decision to separate multiple values to a module was reasonable. However, we also voted to make exact-integer-sqrt, which is in the base module, return multiple values, namely the root and the remainder. That would make the procedure useless unless multiple values are provided.
We can either make multiple values not a module, make exact-integer-sqrt return a list (or single integer) rather than multiple values, relegate exact-integer-sqrt to a new module, remove it altogether, or do nothing and leave the inconsistency.
Andy Wingo suggests: make the clauses in case and cond forms (without =>, naturally) be BODY instances, to allow them to have definitions. It is well defined AFAIK, and costs nothing.
The counter-argument is that it doesn't "look" like the sort of place definitions are allowed.
This is confusing.
If anything, WG2.
These trivial syntaxes add familiarity for new Scheme programmers coming from other languages, as will almost always be the case. LOOP is too big and named-LET too alien.
Emphatically not - this actively encourages non-functional programming, and proper loop macros are more flexible anyway.
Andy Wingo suggests the R6RS handling of escaped embedded newlines:
"asdadf \ asdfadf"in R6RS has the same meaning as "asdf asdfadf". It allows you to nicely indent strings that you need to line-break for width. I suggest that the production
\ NEWLINE WHITESPACE*within string literals be elided.
Note an alternate method for handling embedded strings with nice indentation is scribble syntax.
We voted on various string syntaxes previously but did not specifically propose this R6RS extension. We should have a rationale if we don't follow it.
This is ugly and confusing, and unnecessary if embedded newlines are specified.
R5RS makes a point of specifying that supporting more than two arguments is optional. (Everything not explicitly mentioned is optional, so this may have significance.) R6RS requires accepting 2 or more arguments. Currently Racket, Gambit, Guile, Chez, Ikarus, Larceny, Ypsilon, Mosh, and Scheme 9 support the feature, whereas Gauche, MIT, Chicken, Bigloo, Scheme48/scsh, Kawa, SISC, Chibi, STklos, and SSCM don't.
From the Guile manual:
These procedures accept two real numbers x and y, where the divisor y must be non-zero. centered-quotient returns the integer q and centered-remainder returns the real number r such that x = q*y + r and -|y/2| <= r < |y/2|. centered/ returns both q and r, and is more efficient than computing each separately.
Note that centered-quotient returns x/y rounded to the nearest integer. When x/y lies exactly half-way between two integers, the tie is broken according to the sign of y. If y > 0, ties are rounded toward positive infinity, otherwise they are rounded toward negative infinity. This is a consequence of the requirement that -|y/2| <= r < |y/2|.
Note that these operators are equivalent to the R6RS operators div0, mod0, and div0-and-mod0.
--Andy Wingo
Taylor Campbell thinks these are useless. We should probably have use cases for _any_ division operator we include.
There are too many division operators already. What are they all used for? We need to revisit this.
The documentation for `begin' specifies that it is a sequential construct; but really it splices as well, and also of course it's a keyword for the module system currently. This is inaccurate of the spec to say that "begin is for sequencing".
Suggestion: adopt the language of R6RS section 11.4.7.
--Andy Wingo
We should explain somewhere the four kinds of begins: (begin expr ...), (begin decl ...), top-level begin, and module-top-level begin. Note that R7RS like R5RS does not have (begin decl ... expr ...).
Vote yes to adopt the R6RS description, modified for differences in the language.
We can revisit the language, though R5RS doesn't correspond exactly to R6RS here.
This is possibly difficult to enforce, and can break existing R5RS programs written in very bad style.
But I don't expect many implementations will actually signal an error in this case.
This is possibly difficult to enforce, and can break existing R5RS programs.
Returning more than once is not inherently a bad thing, and if anything we should rely on #172. There's simply no reason to make this an error.
Add blob, blob-map, blob-for-each, and blob conversion functions to and from lists/vectors/strings.
Too much - we'll want a blob library in WG2 anyway.
... with extra arguments.
These are redundant.
R6RS provides a #vu8(...) read-syntax for bytevectors. SRFI-4 uses #u8(...).
Bikeshedding, R6RS wins.
Add a note saying that 1@2 and (make-polar 1 2) MAY evaluate to an inexact complex number.
This makes sense.
The grammar in 7.1.1 allows || as an <identifier>. However, page 5 suggests the |...| form is only for convenience (e.g. |foo bar| is equivalent to foo\x20;bar). There's no way to normalise || to anything without the vertical bars that's a valid identifier. Was that intentional, or should the rule be
<vertical bar> <symbol element>+ <vertical bar>Vote remove to remove the |...| syntax altogether.
Should we include close-port, as a generic version of close-input-port and close-output-port?
You generally know whether it's an input or output port.
The definitions of and and or may be slightly confusing. Reword them to be more clear. One possible hiccup is that the current language permits the return of different false values, while a clearer wording may preclude this.
R6RS provides a clearer definition that does not provide wiggle room for multiple false values. Should we use that?
I don't see why we need to go out of our way to forbid multiple false values if an implementation has them.
The language of the standard could clarify that duplicate bindings are permitted in the clauses of a let*.
Meh.
make-blob should either have an initial value argument, or rationale why it is inconsistent with make-vector and make-string.
Vote yes for an initial value argument.
This is pretty useful, especially without blob-fill!.
There are cases when one does not want to output reader labels for shared structure, such as when you don't care (and want the output to be more legible), or when you know that the time or space requirements to construct the table will be too large.
We could offer a parameter to control this, or have a separate procedure (e.g. write/simple) which doesn't use the reader labels.
Finer grained control may also let use specify a predicate for which values are interesting (e.g. never use labels for strings), or only use labels for cycles, etc.
This control is necessary.