Re: Reader syntax for accessing arrays

[Johan Hidding]

Hi Maciej,

I've been thinking among the same lines. At the same time this syntax could be used to access members of a 'struct' or 'class' object. It should be relatively simple to write a small interpreter (or maybe a pre-compiler).

Otherwise you could make a wrapper around the array in the form of a closure. In that case, your example could be written

(*=! (a i j) 2)

Cheers, Johan

2011/8/23 Panicz Maciej Godek <address@hidden>

Hi,
I've noticed that one of the biggest inconveniences of lisp is a very
clumsy way of accessing arrays.
Having to write
(array-set! a (* (array-ref a i j) 2) i j))
seems to be unnecessarily prolix, for in C, language designed
specifically to access arrays,
the same operation could be written as
a[i][j] *= 2;

Indeed, LISP is intended for processing lists, but there are certain
tasks where dealing with
arrays is inevitable. So perhaps it would be a good idea to use square
brackets, as it is
done in C, to access arrays, so that
[a i j]
could be understood by the interpreter as
(ref-array a i j)
where ref-array is the appropriate getter with setter.

Therefore I wonder how could this functionality be implemented in
guile, or, preferably,
in generic R^5RS. [I've heard that R^6RS makes no distinction between [] and ()]

Regards
Maciek