Re: JACAL, scm

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On 24Sep2001 10:04PM (-0700), Tom Lord wrote:
> 
> 
>        > The '()/#f equivalence was dropped a long time ago.
> 
> It's not too late to fix that.
> 

I don't understand why it's helpful for the two to be equal, besides
Emacs Lisp compatibility, which strikes me as a poor reason. We don't
make 0 equal to #f for C compatibility, or the empty string equal to
#f for perl compatibility. The right place to handle these kinds of
issues would be in translators for or interfaces to those languages.

Or to put it another way, it's more helpful for the Scheme dialect
supported by Guile to be compatible with other Scheme dialects than
for it to be compatible with other languages that Guile supports. A
perfect example of this is the problems Aubrey was having with SLIB
and JACAL. People out there want to write portable Scheme code, and
want to run it in Guile.

And from a theoretical point of view, it makes perfect sense for lists
and booleans to be disjoint types.

 - Maciej