Hi Arne,
On 09/01/2024 07:05, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> It’s a new year — any chance for one more look whether adding SRFI-119
> in Guile is ok to merge?
As a disclaimer, I'm a Scheme newbie, but I think my opinion may have /some/
value.
On its own, Wisp seems like a better syntax for tooling that looks at
files as a
list of lines, rather than as a tree of S-expressions. For example, the diff
tool looks for changes in lines, so when adding a value to the end of a
list it
will always show 1 extra line removed and then added again with one less
paren.
For example (from a record definition):
(device-tree-support? bootloader-configuration-device-tree-support?
- (default #t))) ;boolean
+ (default #t)) ;boolean
+ (extra-initrd bootloader-configuration-extra-initrd
+ (default #f))) ;string | #f
Whereas in Wisp syntax, you'd simply get:
device-tree-support? bootloader-configuration-device-tree-support?
default #t ;boolean
+ extra-initrd bootloader-configuration-extra-initrd
+ default #f ;string | #f
Likewise, commenting code in scheme is a pain because code-commenting is
done by
line. R6RS comments (#;) aren't implemented in Guile to my knowledge. So
parenthesis aware commenting is left up to the editor to implement.
I could say the same about editors like Vim and many other editors that
see the
world as a list of lines.
However it could cause some fragmentation of the community as peoples
editors
are set up for Lisp and not Wisp or vice versa. Though, I think that
could be
mostly resolved if there was a script that could convert Wisp to Lisp
and back.
Ideally such that on a large code base there's very few instances where
Lisp ->
Wisp -> Lisp produces changes the code even by white-space. But, I don't
know
whether even then you'd find much interest from the other maintainers.
Kind regards,
- Christina
