On Wednesday, October 14, 2015 at 3:45:46 PM UTC-7, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > Alex Knauth wrote on 10/14/2015 05:57 PM: > > > > > It's not worth changing the default for all of racket just to avoid > > putting #lang colon-kw racket at the top of a program. > > > > I currently have the opposite opinion on that point. > > Partly because, before I would use `#lang colon-kw racket/base` at the > top of each of my modules, I would use `#lang paddle/base`. Then the > effective forking of the language is perhaps more apparent, even though > the actual texts below the respective differing `#lang` lines would be > identical in both cases. Because I really-really don't want to > effectively fork the Racket dialect in which people write snippets on > email lists and such, that's why I'm investing in the energy-intensive > town hall dialogue that's usually involved in making any programming > language change when it's not simply done by fiat and announced as a > done deal. :) > > Neil V.
It's not "forking the language", it's turning into an opt-in library. The huge difference between the colon-kw language mixin and that paddle/base language is that the form isn't a language. It can be provided to any language. If your paddle/base language didn't provide colon keywords, you could just as easily get them with #lang colon-kw paddle/base. You're not forking anything, you're simply using a library. I find the idea of breaking existing code for such a simple stylistic matter that you can fix with nine extra characters at the top of your file somewhat absurd. This isn't fixing some troublesome misfeature, or adding an important new base language feature, or correcting buggy behavior, it's tweaking a completely superficial minor behavior for aesthetic benefit that's quite opinion-driven and not at all a benefit for even a majority of Racket programmers. That's the kind of thing that belongs precisely in an opt-in library, not in a breaking change of the core language. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
