[Chicken-hackers] whishlist entry: plain scheme read syntax for type declarations

[Jörg F . Wittenberger]

These days I re-learned why I love both dynamic typed languages
for fast prototyping and strict types for compile time checking
of the code.

When it comes to the need to have portable code, chickens
type declarations are mostly easy to hide from non-chicken
Scheme's.  Just define a macro ":" which ignores all arguments
and does nothing.

This allows to have the type declarations right before the
actual definitions, where they belong for clarity and documentation.

However there's an exception: I know (at least) one Scheme implementation,
which bails out badly on the token "#!rest" .

Thus I'm forced to carefully keep those type declarations within
the chicken module instead of the actual code.

Would it be feasible to have an alternate read syntax for #!rest
and #!optional, which maps to plain Scheme readable code?


A suggestion: Since I don't see keywords having a special meaning
in type declarations, why not have #:rest having the same meaning
as #!rest for type declarations.  If that was the case, I could
re-use the -keyword-style switch to make them digestible to other
implementations.


Thanks a lot

/Jörg



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