On 21 January 2011 14:57, John Cowan <co...@mercury.ccil.org> wrote: > David Rush scripsit: > >> Given the wide variety of things that get affected by pattern >> matching, while I admit that this is possible, I don't think it is >> advisable. Pattern matching is a powerfully expressive mechanism - if >> we are going to have it we should properly percolate its power all the >> way through the language. > > You are making the best the enemy of the good,
Yes I am, because once it gets out as a part of the standard, further innovation and improvement will be jeopardized by the existence of legacy code. This is a really big deal given how many issues in Scheme currently exist precisely for backwards compatibility reasons. Really, I would rather do this thing with deep integration, in WG1, and do it in R7RS - even pushing out our deadlines - than get tied into a large legacy code base. >> Are we really willing to go here? I'd be up for it, but I thought that >> the community was shying away from radical changes through >> standardization, and that deep innovation in the Scheme community was >> supposed to be led by implementations. > > Quite so, for WG1. WG2 tracks implementations where they exist, > and attempts to provide them where they don't. This is a case where > implementations exist; all I've done is relabel them, which in a language > with modules is a fairly trivial thing to do. That would seem an argument to *avoid* name overloading through the module system. I would be happier with it if pattern-match was left as an obvious bolt-on, rather than presented as something that is approaching a finished product. david -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss