On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 6:45 PM, David A. Wheeler <dwhee...@dwheeler.com> wrote:
> Alan Manuel Gloria:
>> Handle multiline comments and other #-foolery.
>>
>> TODO: Need to add #{weird symbol}# syntax to Guile
>> compatibility layer.
>
> Youch, that's a lot of complexity to implement what is notionally a simple
> capability.
>
> I'm not sure I understand why this is so complicated. Can you help me
> understand why it's hard to localize the support for multiline functions?
Because of the limitations on the read interface (pass in just a port,
get out just a datum). And the lack of unlimited readahead.
In any case, in a monadic form the support for comment-tag gets hidden
away in the plumbing, but as we are not using a monadic form (this
being Scheme where monadic form is not idiomatic) then any changes in
the plumbing become significant changes *everywhere*.
For example, in the modern-expressions parser I sent on the list a
long way back, I think the changes would have been *much* more
localized into the parser backend.
But since there is no parser backend in the basic implementation,
there is nothing to locally change - every function handles the port
directly, instead of indicating some transformation that will
*eventually* handle the port.
In short, not enough abstraction in the initial implementation ^^
> Maybe we can change how we interpret something, so we can vastly simplify
> the implementation. Before merging, I want to make sure we *have* to go this
> way; this will have a continuing drag on any other implementation work. It
> may be hamper acceptance, if the implementation has to be this ugly; the code
> will certainly be part of a SRFI proposal.
>
> In short: Can we find another, simpler way to do this?
Yeah, monads. Or macros.
Sincerely,
AmkG
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