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From: | Panicz Maciej Godek |
Subject: | Re: Making apostrophe, backtick, etc. hygienic? |
Date: | Mon, 31 Aug 2015 13:58:57 +0200 |
Panicz Maciej Godek <address@hidden> writes:
> Your point is that quote (and unquote, and quasiquote, and syntax, and
> unsyntax, and quasisyntax) is a reader macro, so one might forget that
> 'x is really (quote x) -- because that indeed cannot be infered from
> the source code.
Yup, exactly.
> You've got the point, but I think that the only reasonable solution
> would be to make the compiler issue warning whenever reader macro
> identifiers are being shadowed.
That's a good idea as well. It might annoy some users though, when they
really want to shadow 'quote' (or 'syntax'). Dunno.
> Putting the issue with "syntax" aside, making 'foo expand to
> (__quote__ foo) would be surprising to anyone who actually wanted to
> shadow "quote". As I mentioned earlier, there are libraries that make
> use of the fact that 'x is (quote x). Take a look in here, for
> example:
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=guile.git;a=blob;f=module/ice-9/match.upstream.scm;h=ede1d43c9ff8b085cb5709678c4227f5ecaaa8a5;hb=HEAD#l335
>
> (match '(a b)
> (('a 'b) #t)
> (_ #f))
>
> would no longer evaluate to #t, because the ('a 'b) pattern would
> actually be read as ((__quote__ a) (__quote__ b)). You'd need to
> change all occurences of "quote" with "__quote__" in the
> match.upstream.scm (and in every other library that shadows quote for
> its purpose) in order to make it work, thus making Guile
> non-RnRS-compliant.
Hmm, that gets a little complicated, yeah. Still, in highly RnRS
compliant systems, macros actually match their "literal" inputs by
(hygienic) "bindings" and not the names of identifiers. I.e., if the
quote and __quote__ identifiers hold the *same binding*, then a macro
that has 'quote' in its literals list will also match '__quote__' for
that literal. (Magic!) I seem to remember Guile 2.2 really does this
the pedantically right way, while Guile 2.0 is more lax about it.
The only RnRS-compliant code that would break is code which itself
shadows 'quote' and expects its shadowing to work with 'foo. Like:
(let ((quote -)) '9) ;=> -9
Dunno if there's any serious Scheme/Guile code out in the wild which
actually relies on this working.
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