Re: Guile: What's wrong with this?

[David Kastrup]

Bruce Korb <address@hidden> writes:

> On 01/04/12 04:19, Ian Price wrote:
>> ...  As for mutable strings, I consider them
>> a mistake to begin with,...
>
> Let's step back and consider the whole point of Guile in the first place.
>
> My understanding is that one primary purpose is to be a facilitation
> language so that application developers have less to worry about and
> futz over.  An extension language, if you like that phrase.  As such,
> it would seem to me that a primary design goal would be to make the
> pathway as smooth as possible, rather than trying to emulate C and/or
> official Scheme language specs as closely as possible.  To me, my primary
> concern is doing my little thing with the least total hassle.  Having
> to study up on and thoroughly understand the Scheme language seems
> a lot harder than just using Perl (or what-have-you).  Most scripting
> languages don't cut you off at the knees (change interfaces).
>
> So my main question is:
>
>   Which is the higher priority, language purity or ease of use?

Encouraging language abuse like making _literals_ not eq? to themselves
makes a language unpredictable.  That is not a road to ease of use.  It
is a dead end.

> and fix the 1.9 bug (scribbling on shared strings) by making them
> copy-on-write thingys.

So you want to give eq? unpredictable semantics as well.  What else has
made your black list of things to sacrifice in order to keep undefined
code working in a particular undefined way?

-- 
David Kastrup