[gambit-list] anyone get schelog working with gambit-c?

Christian Jaeger christian at pflanze.mine.nu
Fri Aug 24 08:22:43 EDT 2007


|/|/ Bendick wrote:
> I understand the importance of different implementations of the same
> language having the same semantics, but are there any reasons why it
> would be a bad thing to create a language , suspiciously similar to
> scheme, where () is self evaluating?
>   

For the record, here's Common Lisp's behaviour (at least how SBCL 0.8.16 
works):

* ()
NIL
* nil
NIL
* '(a b c)
(A B C)
* '(a b nil)
(A B NIL)
* '(a b ())
(A B NIL)
* '(a b . nil)
(A B)

I guess the Schemes which make () self quoting do this mainly for people 
coming from CL.

But I think requiring the user to quote it is fine. It's making for 
consistent list handling, and cases where you open a pair of parens in 
Emacs, and then forget to fill something in, will be trapped as error.

(I'm coming from Perl but I *like* that Scheme is explicit in such 
things (also for example the explicit string/number/boolean types).)

That said, this is an example where you could add a rule to a module 
processor to interpret code which relies on self-quoting () on an 
evaluation/compilation engine which doesn't allow those. I'll do it, 
promised (may take some time still).

Christian.




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